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Florida State University Libraries
Honors Theses
The Division of Undergraduate Studies
2012
"Untamed Music": Early Jazz in Vaudeville
Steven Lewis
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Abstract:
(jazz, vaudeville, early jazz, jazz history)
Vaudeville, which was one of the most influential entertainment genres in
America at the turn of the century, was also important to the early development of jazz.
Vaudeville’s role in jazz history has not often figured into discussions of early jazz
because the earliest jazz historians were record collectors who relied heavily on sound
recordings to establish the history of the music, leading them to marginalize the
contributions of musicians or bands that did not make records. Touring vaudeville,
minstrel shows, and circuses played a crucial role in jazz’s development and
dissemination. Many of the influential jazz artists of the teens and twenties, such as
Alvin “Zoo” Robertson, Wilbur Sweatman, Freddie Keppard, and Ferdinand “Jelly Roll”
Morton began their careers playing in tents and theaters around the country as vaudeville
entertainers.
Traveling vaudeville shows were the most significant factor in the spread of jazz
before the advent of recording, and brought early jazz to appreciative audiences even
before 1917, when the first jazz recordings became available. After these initial
recordings, the shows carried jazz to remote areas of the country where jazz records were
less likely to be available. These shows continued to be important for the careers of jazz
musicians until the mid thirties, when the ascendance of film and radio led to vaudeville’s
terminal decline. In this paper I explore in detail the role that touring vaudeville shows
played in the development and popularization of jazz in the first decades of the twentieth
century.
THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF MUSIC
“UNTAMED MUSIC”: EARLY JAZZ IN VAUDEVILLE
By
STEVEN LEWIS
A Thesis submitted to the
College of Music
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with
Honors in the Major
Degree Awarded:
Spring, 2013
The members of the Defense Committee approve the thesis of Steven Lewis defended
on November 26, 2012.
______________________________
Dr. Michael Broyles
Thesis Director
______________________________
Dr. Neil Jumonville
Outside Committee Member
______________________________
Prof. Leon Anderson
Committee Member
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
1
CHAPTER 1: THE DEVELOPMENT OF VAUDEVILLE
11
CHAPTER 2: JAZZ IN VAUDEVILLE, BEGINNINGS TO 1917
23
CHAPTER 3: JAZZ IN VAUDEVILLE, 1917-1940
46
CHAPTER 4: VAUDEVILLE IN JAZZ
64
CONCLUSION
75
BIBLIOGRAPHY
78
i
Introduction
This paper explores the central—and seldom discussed—role that
vaudeville played in the national popularization of the new music that we now
know as jazz in the teens, twenties, and thirties. I will argue that vaudeville
shows (and vaudeville-style entertainment generally, in the cases of circus
sideshows, floor shows, and revues) were as important as recordings in the early
dissemination of jazz and in jazz’s rapid metamorphosis from a regional,
predominantly African-American folk music to an internationally popular art form.
I also consider the influence that vaudeville performance and culture had on jazz
performance practice, focusing on elements such as expressive devices and
showmanship in jazz performance.
Traditional biases in jazz research have largely precluded sustained
discussion of the role that vaudeville played in jazz history. The study of early
jazz as established by the first jazz researchers in the 1930s prized “authentic”
folk expression and rejected anything that hinted of commercialism. As John
Gennari notes in his history of jazz criticism, the earliest jazz historians viewed
jazz history through a decidedly anticommercial lens:
…there emerged an aestheticized discourse of jazz as an art music, a
discourse—carried out in collectors’ “hot clubs” and in the Modernisminspired “little magazines” attached to them— that became central to the
establishment of a jazz canon centered on recordings other than the most
commercially successful, largely white acts of the swing era. This
1
anticommercial, connoisseurial discourse has been central to jazz—has,
in fact, defined the very idea of jazz—down to our time.1
The anticommercial discourse that characterized jazz historiography in the 1930s
and 1940s led historians of the period to elevate the work of unschooled New
Orleans musicians like Willie “Bunk” Johnson and Charles “Buddy” Bolden while
devaluing the more commercial work of musicians like Wilbur Sweatman. For
example, historians often dismissed Sweatman, a contemporary of the earliest
known New Orleans jazz musicians, as a mere “novelty” musician because he
spent his career in vaudeville. Consequently, they mostly failed to investigate his
impressive jazz credentials, which include what is arguably the first recorded
example of jazz improvisation.* The precedent set by the first jazz historians has
left a large hole in scholarly discourse regarding early jazz musicians’ activities in
vaudeville.
In recent years, a few books on the period of jazz history between 1908
and 1923 have dealt with vaudeville, usually in the context of biographies or
studies of individual bands. Lawrence Gushee’s Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of
the Creole Band chronicles the touring career of the famous Creole Band, which
played and performed around the country in vaudeville from 1914 to 1918. In
supplementary biographical material of each musician in the band, Gushee goes
into detail about their early careers, including other touring engagements that
they held. He also discusses vaudeville’s importance in turn-of-the-century
America and the flexible definitions of the words “jazz” and “ragtime” at this point
1
John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2006), 121.
*
See Chapter 2
2
in the music’s history. Gushee makes use of newspaper articles and interviews
to piece together the Creole Band’s touring schedule between 1914 and 1918 as
well as contemporary reviews of the band in order to make educated guesses as
to how they may have sounded.
Another book providing information on jazz in American vaudeville and
circuses is Mark Berresford’s That’s Got ‘Em! The Life and Music of Wilbur C.
Sweatman. In chronicling the life of pioneering jazz and vaudeville clarinetist
Wilbur Sweatman, Berresford investigates some previously unexplored areas of
the early history of jazz. He provides information not only on Sweatman’s
performance dates and playing style, but also on the little-known musicians with
whom he played, who were among the first generation of jazz musicians.
Berresford, interestingly, wrote this biography with the express purpose of
shedding light on this facet of jazz history. In his introduction, he writes:
“In researching and writing this book, it became apparent early on that the
roles of black theater, tented touring shows, circus sideshows, and
vaudeville played a much greater part in the early development of jazz
than has generally been acknowledged. One could go so far as to state
that, without an established, self-directed black theater and entertainment
network already in place by the beginning of the twentieth century, the
whole course of jazz history would have been altered massively.”2
Because of the wealth of information that Berresford offers on Sweatman and
other early jazz musicians touring America at the turn of the century, That’s Got
‘Em is among the most thoroughly researched and useful books on early jazz.
Like Berresford’s book, Abbott and Seroff’s Ragged but Right: Black
Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz is
2
Mark Berresford, That’s Got ‘Em! The Life and Music of Wilbur C. Sweatman (Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2010), xi.
3
devoted to the argument that stage shows played an important role in the
development of jazz, but unlike Berresford’s book, Ragged but Right is primarily
concerned with tent shows and circuses rather than theatrical vaudeville. Abbott
and Seroff include detailed rosters and touring schedules of several minstrel
companies in the appendices. The main text includes biographical information
on important minstrel musicians and actors, as well as copious newspaper
advertisements, reviews, and photographs.
This paper will take a broader view of the roles jazz musicians played
throughout the history of American vaudeville. From the turn of the century to the
mid-1930s, vaudeville was one of the most popular and influential entertainment
genres in America. It served as one of the first conduits through which popular
culture and trends reached the American masses. Vaudeville shows provided
the public with some of the first pop music and with a lexicon of beloved stage
personalities. In the period before the proliferation of radio and television, white
entertainers performed in a network of theaters in cities around the country,
dispensing the latest Tin Pan Alley songs as well as comedy and stunts.
Similarly, black entertainers toured circuits of smaller theaters catering to black
audiences and performed in tented variety shows.
Regardless of race, and in all performance contexts, these artists played a
crucial role in the spread of popular music. As Lawrence Gushee writes in his
Pioneers of Jazz, “the primary mode of dissemination of the popular song in the
United States between 1900 and 1930 was the vaudeville stage.”3 Popular
3
Lawrence Gushee, Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), 12.
4
culture as represented by vaudeville permeated American society to an
unprecedented extent and was a potent vehicle for the proliferation of new ideas
and styles.
African-American folk music was arguably the first style to reach the wider
American public through the medium of touring stage shows. Although the
widespread popularity of black music reached an early peak in the ragtime era of
the 1890s, the roots of this fascination are in the minstrel shows of the mid-19th
century. The classic minstrel show, as developed by Dan Emmett and the
Virginia Minstrels, was a sort of proto-vaudeville that drew most of its material
from a heavily caricatured version of black folk culture. These shows typically
included music as well as comedy skits and dances.4 Classic minstrelsy was
extremely popular with the white American public, especially in the Northeast.
Although built largely on negative stereotypes, these shows were important in
that they spread the idea of black music and culture to the general public, thus
creating an audience for later productions and paving the way for lessdemeaning representations of African-Americans.
This earliest form of American touring entertainment was also important in
that it provided the first important large-scale performance opportunities for
African-Americans. Black minstrel companies, which became prominent in the
years immediately following the Civil War, performed on very successful
extended tours and served to establish an African-American presence in
American theater by the late 19th century. Black minstrelsy tended to be less
4
Clayton W. Henderson, "Minstrelsy, American," In Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/18749 (accessed February 11, 2012).
5
reliant on racial stereotypes for humor, and black minstrel companies introduced
new elements, such as gospel music, to the established formula of the traditional
minstrel show. By the 1890s, these groups were performing in a sort of hybrid
vaudeville-minstrel style influenced by Broadway productions and the music of
Tin Pan Alley.5
At the end of the 19th century, white and black vaudeville shows had
incorporated the popular new ragtime style into their acts, typically in the form of
simplified “coon songs.” Reflecting the influence of black minstrelsy and
vaudeville, “coon songs,” while still uncomfortably racist by modern standards,
were more representative of an authentic black perspective.6 Although ragtime
did not become widely known until the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in
Chicago, touring shows were performing syncopated pieces in the ragtime style
by the late 1880s.7 American vaudeville companies would demonstrate a similar
sensitivity to new musical ideas and changes in popular taste in their early
incorporation of jazz in the first decades of the 20th century.
By the early teens, small-time black vaudeville companies and circus
sideshow troupes were already displaying the influence of early jazz in both their
ensemble work and in the playing of their featured soloists. Many pioneers of
jazz, including Freddie Keppard, William Crickett Smith, Willie “Bunk” Johnson,
Alvin “Zoo” Robertson, Horace Eubanks, William “King” Phillips, Wilbur
Sweatman, and Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, spent the first part of their careers
5
Ibid.
Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark
Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 12.
7
Edward A. Berlin, "Ragtime," In Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/22825 (accessed February 11, 2012).
6
6
working with touring vaudeville shows or circuses. Vaudeville work was an
important source of income for professional jazz musicians in the early 1900s.
New Orleans guitarist Danny Barker later remembered that in the late teens and
early twenties,
…all the big circuses would come through New Orleans. And if they
needed a musician, they know they could pick one up in New Orleans. All
the minstrel shows, like the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, and Silas Green and
the Georgia Minstrels, used New Orleans musicians year in and out. You
would see a cat disappear, you would wonder where he was, and finally
somebody would say that he’d left for one of the shows, that they had sent
for him.8
In a vaudeville context, jazz was not played by small groups of non-reading
musicians, but by small to medium-sized orchestras that played a mixture of
improvised music and sheet music to accompany the acts during shows. In this
way, black orchestras in small-time vaudeville adopted an early practice of white
vaudeville orchestras, which in the 1870s and 1880s had relied heavily on
improvised cues to “follow” the acts onstage. It is easy to see how early jazz
improvisation fit easily into this preexisting tradition. Limited improvisation,
usually from one or two key soloists in the ensemble, also appeared in the street
parades that advertised a vaudeville troupe’s arrival in a new town.
During these early years, jazz musicians often worked as featured soloists
with the black vaudeville orchestras. William “King” Phillips, for example, worked
for years as a clarinetist and orchestra leader with touring vaudeville troupes.
Jazz clarinetist Buster Bailey would later remember Phillips as “one of the first
8
Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It
(New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966), 67.
7
jazz clarinet players [he] ever heard.”9 Even more important was clarinetist
Wilbur Sweatman, who was a noted soloist with PG Lowery’s circus sideshow
band as early as 1902. In 1908, Sweatman moved to Chicago and formed what
observers remembered as one of the first jazz bands. In 1925, bandleader Dave
Peyton would write, “little did we think that Mr. Sweatman’s original style of
playing would be adopted by the greatest jazz artists of today; but it is and Mr.
Sweatman can claim the honour of being the first to establish it.”10 In 1916,
Sweatman went on to make what was arguably the first jazz recording. His
recording of his composition “Down Home Rag” is the clearest recorded example
of jazz improvisation that we have dating from before the jazz band recordings of
the late teens.
A few early jazz bands also appeared in mainstream white vaudeville
before 1917. The most famous of these was the Creole Band, which was best
known for featuring cornetist Freddie Keppard. The Creole Band spent four
seasons touring on mainstream vaudeville circuits, where they framed their
music with an act strongly resembling traditional minstrelsy.
Jazz’s rapid rise to popularity following the 1917 Original Dixieland Jazz
Band recordings led to the widespread use of jazz in all sorts of vaudeville
contexts. The new music was everywhere in vaudeville, and the two art forms
became nearly inseparable. As David Savran wrote: “…for the many Americans,
both white and black, who frequented dance halls, vaudeville shows, and musical
9
Ibid., 77.
Mark Berresford, That’s Got ‘Em! The Life and Music of Wilbur C. Sweatman (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2010), 51-52.
10
8
comedy, theater was jazz—and jazz was theater.”11 During these years,
vaudeville shows used jazz for comedic effect (as in the ODJB’s barnyard sound
effects), to accompany singers, and to accompany dancers like Joe Frisco, Frank
Farnum, and the Whitman Sisters.
With the rise of the big bands at the start of the Swing Era, the
freewheeling ensemble improvisation of 1920s jazz was replaced by tight,
disciplined ensemble work and carefully allotted solo space for outstanding
improvisers. This in turn led to a shift in jazz’s image in the popular imagination.
The American public no longer viewed jazz as chaotic or a nuisance. Instead,
jazz acquired a new sophistication and respectability, while also achieving its
widest popularity. This shift is adumbrated by bandleader Paul Whiteman’s
“symphonic jazz” concerts, which featured new works by George Gershwin and
Ferde Grofé. Correspondingly, jazz musicians began to play less for comedic
effect and more to provide incidental music, to accompany virtuoso dancers, and
for a few feature numbers interspersed throughout a show. Major vaudeville
shows, now known as revues, included comedians, singers, specialty acts,
dancing chorus lines and dancers like Fred Astaire or the Nicholas Brothers,
accompanied by swing bands like those of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and
Chick Webb.12 Jazz continued to appear in revues as accompaniment until the
11
David Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (Ann Arbor:
The University of Michigan Press, 2009), 4.
12
Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the
Swing Era (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 11-23.
9
decline of white vaudeville in the early thirties, followed a few years later by the
decline of black vaudeville in the face of the now-dominant film industry.13
The history of jazz up to the 1940s dovetails neatly with the history of
American popular entertainment, a designation that for the first few decades of
the 20th century was synonymous with vaudeville. As a result, it is illuminating to
explore the relationship between America’s music and what for a long time was
America’s popular theater. The following chapters will challenge previously held
assumptions about jazz history—particularly those regarding New Orleans as the
sole birthplace of early jazz—and shed light on jazz’s place in the broader
popular culture landscape of the early 20th century.
13
Nadine George-Graves, The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of
Race, Gender, and Class in African-American Theater, 1900-1940 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000),
103-109.
10
Chapter 1: The Development of Vaudeville
From its inception in the late 19th century to its gradual decline beginning in
the 1930s, vaudeville was America’s most popular and influential entertainment
genre. The dramatic growth and change that America experienced during
vaudeville’s heyday (from the 1880s to the 1930s) created two factors that
allowed the art form to gain an unprecedented level of popularity with the entire
nation. First, the mechanization of American factories in the late 19th century
lowered the demand for manual labor and created the idea of “leisure time” for
the working class. This in turn led to a much greater demand for popular
entertainment, a need that vaudeville met readily.14 Second, the vast influx of
European immigrants in the second half of the 19th century—twenty million
arrived between 1870 and 1910—created a new audience hungry for
entertainment that was cheap and definitively “American.”15 These things,
combined with the technological advances of the late 19th century, made
vaudeville an exceptional conduit for the transmission of new and exciting ideas
in the arts. New inventions like trains, automobiles, and steamships made fast
long distance travel feasible, meaning that performers could quickly travel around
the country to perform strings of engagements in different cities.16 Telephones
and telegraphs allowed for long-distance booking and negotiations.17 This
distribution system became even more efficient after the creation of a corporate
14
Trav S. D., No Applause—Just Throw Money: The Book that Made Vaudeville Famous (New York:
Faber and Faber Inc., 2005), 8.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.,9.
17
Ibid.
11
structure in which entertainers would tour around circuits of theaters owned by a
single large management firm, such as the Keith-Albee Circuit.18 The
management infrastructure that developed around vaudeville was the root of the
modern American entertainment industry.
The earliest manifestation of vaudeville, also called variety, grew out of
various disparate 19th century entertainment genres. Minstrel shows were the
most popular form of American entertainment just before vaudeville; most of
vaudeville’s defining elements came directly from the earlier genre. Minstrel
entertainers introduced the “comedy team,” a concept that continues to be vitally
important to American comedy. A typical minstrel show featured comedic
dialogue between Mr. Interlocutor (an early version of comedy’s “straight man”)
and Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones, who would bounce jokes off him.19 This formula
has reappeared in nearly all forms of comedy since the minstrel era. An even
more consequential element of minstrelsy was the olio, which was the climax of a
classic minstrel show. The olio was a seemingly random collection of acts; it
featured musicians, comedic speeches, drag acts, jig dancers, and
miscellaneous entertainment.20 A few decades later, variety entertainment would
emerge as essentially an expanded version of the minstrel olio. Circuses were
another important influence on early vaudeville. Like vaudeville, they featured a
variety of different acts, including jugglers, acrobats, trained animals, and clowns.
Many of vaudeville’s seminal figures spent their early careers working in
circuses; actor and manager Tony Pastor got his start there, as did vaudeville
18
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 38.
20
Ibid.
19
12
tycoon B. F. Keith, who ran away to work as a roustabout for a circus at age
fourteen.21 Pastor, who worked briefly as a ringmaster,22 remained heavily
influenced by circus culture for the rest of his career; he often greeted guests at
his theaters dressed in the ringmaster’s uniform of top hat, swallowtail coat, and
riding boots.23 A third early influence on vaudeville was the boat show. Boat
shows, though little-known today, were a popular regional entertainment in mid
19th century America. Essentially floating theater companies, boat shows played
to audiences along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, often in exchange for
food or goods.24
The first vaudeville shows were largely an urban phenomenon and took
place in seedy establishments known as variety houses or concert saloons.
Beginning in the 1850s, variety entertainment existed mainly within the vice
districts of towns and cities, such as the Bowery and Chinatown in New York
City, the Black Hole and Hell’s Half Acre in Chicago, and San Francisco’s
Barbary Coast.25 Although members of polite society largely tolerated variety
houses and concert saloons, they viewed them as disreputable. This negative
reputation was mostly correct; many variety houses were rife with prostitution,
brawling, and drunkenness.26 Early vaudeville shows catered almost exclusively
to men. Songs often had suggestive lyrics,27 and many houses featured troupes
of women who performed in various stages of undress. The Bowery Theater’s
21
Ibid., 72.
Ibid., 65.
23
Ibid., 71.
24
Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville: Its Life and Times (New York: Dover Publications, 1963), 4-6.
25
Trav S. D., No Applause, 40-42.
26
Ibid., 45.
27
Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 10-13.
22
13
“Arab Girls,” for example, dressed in skimpy costumes and performed acrobatics
and balancing acts.28 Also popular were tableaux vivants, in which actresses
would pose motionless onstage in imitation of a classic sculpture or painting,
usually in a revealing costume like a flesh colored body suit or a toga.29
19th century museums featured a more family-friendly form of early
vaudeville. Vaudeville museums developed from America’s earliest museums,
especially Charles Willson Peale’s Peale Museum in Philadelphia. Founded in
1786, the Peale Museum featured an art exhibit, a menagerie, a display of
minerals, natural history exhibits, historical artifacts, wax figures, natural oddities
(such as a five-headed cow), and an auditorium for lectures and dramatic
performances.30 Peale’s example proved influential; using Peale as a model,
famed showman P. T. Barnum expanded on Peale’s idea of the museum as a
form of entertainment when he opened Barnum’s American Museum in
Manhattan in 1841. Barnum’s Museum was both educational (with exhibitions of
exotic animals and historical artifacts, as well as educational lectures in the
lecture room) and entertaining (it also housed circus-style acts and a “freak”
show). Most importantly, the museum’s auditorium featured variety-style
entertainment without its disreputable elements, such as lewdness, violence,
drinking, and prostitution. In this way, Barnum’s Museum was the immediate
forerunner of B. F. Keith’s “polite”31 vaudeville.32 Dime museums sprang up
28
Gillian M. Rodger, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 24.
29
Ibid., 22-23.
30
Trav S. D., No Applause, 56.
31
Historians often refer to Keith’s vaudeville as “polite” because it lacked the vulgar elements that
characterized the earlier shows. See below for more information on Keith’s innovations.
14
around the country inspired by the success of Barnum’s Museum. Dime
museums were divided buildings housing a “freak” show and a variety show.33
They were noticeably more sleazy than Barnum’s original museum had been;
they placed more emphasis on the “freak” shows, and many also hosted some
discreet prostitution.34 Because aerial acts were out of the question and animal
acts were more difficult to stage within the confines of a museum, museum
shows placed greater emphasis on musicians, comedians, jugglers, and
magicians.35 With its higher salary and relative consistency, museum work
proved tempting to many variety entertainers of the day. Unfortunately, these
entertainers were often overworked, performing in as many as seventeen shows
per day.36 Although less wholesome than Barnum’s American Museum, the
public still viewed dime museums as relatively safe family entertainment.37 The
mixed audiences of men, women, and children led managers of dime museums
to ban any suggestive or obscene acts.38
Entertainer and manager Antonio “Tony” Pastor was the most important
figure in the early history of vaudeville. Pastor entered show business at an early
age; his first public performance was at age six, when he sang at a temperance
meeting.39 He soon began his first professional work at Barnum’s Museum in
Manhattan, which advertised him as a “Child Prodigy.”40 During these early
32
Ibid., 60-62.
Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 20-23.
34
S. D., No Applause, 63.
35
Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 20-23.
33
Be
37
S. D., No Applause, 63.
Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 20-23.
39
Anthony Slide, The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), 390.
40
S. D., No Applause, 65.
38
15
years, Pastor also worked variously as an acrobat, a dancer, and an end man in
a minstrel show.41 By the start of the Civil War, he had entered the nascent
variety genre. Pastor’s first job in a variety show was in 1860, when he worked
as a comic singer at Philadelphia’s Melodeon Theater.42 His masterful
showmanship more than made up for his lack of musical talent; although Pastor’s
contemporaries would later remember him as a poor singer, he had a long and
successful performing career, eventually amassing a repertoire of fifteen hundred
songs.43 By the 1860s Pastor was working to remove vaudeville houses’
disreputable image, trying especially hard to appeal to middle class patrons and
families. He established Tony Pastor’s Opera House in the Bowery district of
New York City in 1865, advertising it as “fun without vulgarity.” Pastor also took
the unusual step of having rowdy patrons escorted off the premises.44 In 1881,
Pastor presided over what historians regard as the birth of clean vaudeville when
he staged the first family-friendly variety show at his Fourteenth Street Theater in
New York.45 During this period, Pastor began using unorthodox methods, like
handing out door prizes, to attract a more varied audience. Annie Yeamans, a
singer and dancer who worked for Pastor, remembered:
In those days ladies didn’t come [to variety houses], and Tony Pastor set
about to remedy this state of affairs. It was interesting to see how he
accomplished it. He began giving what he called ladies’ matinees, and
soon got many of them coming to all the performances. At the ladies
matinees he used to give away bags of flour as souvenirs, and it was
41
Slide, Encyclopedia, 390.
Ibid.
43
S. D., No Applause, 65.
44
Ibid.
45
Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 113.
42
16
funny to see the women of the neighborhood carrying away the big
packages from the performances. He later got to giving away clocks.46
Pastor also appealed to women by presenting female stars, such as Lillian
Russell (whom Pastor billed as “The American Beauty”), as icons of femininity
and women’s fashion instead of sex objects.47
Benjamin Franklin Keith, who began his career as a vaudeville manager in
the 1880s, dominated American show business for the duration of the vaudeville
era and created the framework for the modern entertainment industry. Keith’s
innovations created modern vaudeville by further sanitizing and standardizing
vaudeville entertainment; the new shows were endlessly reproducible—a
predetermined series of interchangeable acts ran in a continuous loop—and
appealed to the widest possible audience. B. F. Keith was born in New
Hampshire in 1846. At fourteen, he ran away from home to join the circus. After
touring with the circus, Keith began working with dime museums. He opened his
first museum, the Gaiety, in Boston in 1883, hiring Edward Albee to manage the
museum shortly after opening it. Keith’s partnership with Albee would make the
two men the most powerful businessmen in vaudeville. Albee’s genius lay in
making vaudeville entertainment as accessible (i.e. cheap) as possible while at
the same time giving it a veneer of elegance. He eliminated the museum’s
animal exhibits and focused its energy on the variety element by staging bootleg
versions of popular operettas and charging very cheap admission. In 1895,
46
"Tony Pastor and His Sixty Years on the Stage." New York Times (1857-1922), Aug 16, 1908.
http://search.proquest.com/docview/96806698?accountid=4840.
47
S. D., No Applause, 68-70.
17
Albee replaced the word “variety” with the French “vaudeville” to give the shows
an air of Continental sophistication.48
Keith and Albee’s most consequential innovation was the idea of
continuous vaudeville, which they first introduced at the Gaiety Theater in 1895.
They borrowed the concept of continuous performance from dime museums,
where acts would perform a nonstop loop of around fifteen shows per day.49
Continuous vaudeville proved hugely profitable, because it allowed Keith and
Albee’s theaters to generate income almost constantly, while traditional theaters
only generated income for a few hours each day and spent most of the day
accumulating expenses.50 Keith would later explain that continuous vaudeville
was both highly profitable and an effective marketing tool for his theaters:
It was clear that the majority of people would stay through an
entertainment so long as they could, even sitting out acts that had to be
repeated. The old form necessitated a final curtain at a specified time,
and the emptying of the house. As a result the succeeding audience
gathered slowly, the theatre was necessarily dreary as they came into it,
and there was nothing going on…Well, that is one of the things that
continuous performance does away with. It matters not at what hour of
the day or evening you visit, the theatre is always occupied by more or
less people, the show is in full swing, everything is bright, cheerful and
inviting…I was always maneuvering to keep patrons moving up and down
stairs in view of passerby on the sidewalk for the specific purpose of
impressing them with the idea that business was immense.51
The structure of continuous vaudeville (a series of unrelated acts performed in a
loop) meant that the management could easily remove unpopular acts.
48
Ibid., 72-73.
Ibid., 85
50
Ibid., 86.
51
B. F. Keith, “The Vogue of the Vaudeville,” in American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries,
edited by Charles W. Stein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). Originally published in National
Magazine 9 (November 1898), 15-16.
49
18
Additionally, the rapid-fire pace of the new shows meant that it was very easy to
sustain the audience’s attention and avoid disappointment.52
Continuous vaudeville led to the explosion of vaudeville as an
entertainment industry, rather than a genre confined to urban theaters. It was an
efficient system that appealed to as many people as possible by covering as
much stylistic ground as possible. As vaudeville historian Trav S. D. writes, Keith
and Albee’s continuous vaudeville applied industrial production techniques to
variety theater, creating shows that were uniform, reproducible, and could be
performed virtually anywhere.53 Continuous vaudeville necessarily eliminated
most of the early variety shows’ spontaneity, and the new shows’ need for
uniformity led to a corresponding disappearance of the improvised musical cues
and accompaniment of variety theater in favor of carefully planned
orchestrations. The music for a vaudeville show had to be reproducible
anywhere, just like the show itself.
Much like mainstream vaudeville, the development of black vaudeville
began with minstrel shows. Blacks had been performing in blackface minstrel
shows—mainly for white audiences—since the 1860s.54 Although these shows
perpetuated negative racial stereotypes, black minstrels improved them
somewhat by incorporating elements of authentic African-American culture, like
the buck-and-wing and stop-time dances.55 The development of minstrelsy had
two important effects: first, it led white audiences to become comfortable with
52
S. D., No Applause, 91-92.
Ibid., 85
54
Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Blackface: A Source Book on Early Black Musical Shows (Mentuchen: The
Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1980), 1.
55
Ibid.
53
19
seeing blacks on stage; second, it began white America’s enduring fascination
with black cultural products. Minstrelsy’s popularity led to the development of
what Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff call “vaudevillized minstrelsy,” or the gradual
incorporation of minstrel-show conventions into vaudeville, as traditional
minstrelsy declined in popularity in favor of variety shows.56
In the late 1890s, the popularity of ragtime and ragtime-derived “coon
songs” led many mainstream white vaudeville theaters to book a handful of black
performers (known as singles). Comedians Bert Williams and George Walker,
songwriter and producer Bob Cole, and comedian Ernest Hogan (composer of
the hit song “All Coons Look Alike to Me”) were some of the artists who worked in
mainstream vaudeville during this period.57 White audiences were hungry for
black acts and often responded enthusiastically to those few black acts that were
able to make their way into the mainstream theatres. Vaudevillian and historian
Joe Laurie, Jr. remembered:
With the doors now opened by the cakewalkers and coon shouters, there
came to variety many talented Negroes, mostly singers and dancers.
Don’t know why, but audiences would applaud a Negro dancer with
inferior talent more than they would a much better white dancer…58
Some all-black companies (known as “big shows”) also gained the
opportunity to appear on the mainstream vaudeville circuits, where they typically
performed a mixture of weeklong engagements in major cities and one-night-
56
Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Out of Sight: The Rise of African-American Popular Music, 1889-1895
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), xi.
57
Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon
Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2007), 38-39.
58
Joe Laurie, Jr., Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1953), 202.
20
stands in remote areas. White investors heavily funded these companies in an
attempt to satisfy white audiences’ demand for black acts while also drawing
larger black audiences to segregated mainstream theatres.59 The two best
known big shows were Ernest Hogan’s Smart Set Company and the Black Patti
Troubadours. Big shows featured many of the musical comedy elements of
white vaudeville shows, but they made heavy use of minstrel-inspired comedy in
place of the white shows’ more varied ethnic humor, mainly because black
comedians could not convincingly imitate European immigrants and Jewish
Americans before white audiences. The music in the shows was a mixture of
ragtime, popular music, and light opera. Big shows’ reliance on minstrel
stereotypes allowed them to tour successfully in the South, where minstrel shows
were still popular.60
At around the same time as black performers were making limited inroads
into mainstream vaudeville, black tented minstrelsy developed from the older
antebellum and Reconstruction-era minstrel shows, which were performed in
theaters. Because of vaudeville’s huge popularity, black tent shows also came to
offer vaudeville style entertainment that catered to black audiences and spoke to
black culture. Tent shows toured throughout the South, including remote areas
far frofm major theatres. These shows, which grew into a beloved Southern
tradition and persisted long into the 20th century, commonly featured parades,
jazz bands, comedians, dancers, trained animals, and other acts in common with
the more traditional vaudeville shows. Allen’s New Orleans Minstrels, the
59
60
Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 38.
Ibid., 39-40.
21
Rabbit’s Foot Minstrel Company, the Florida Blossom Minstrels, Silas Green from
New Orleans, and Tolliver’s Big Show were the most famous tented minstrel
shows.61
Another, little-known black presence in popular entertainment was in the
circus. By the late 19th-century, blacks had been working in circuses for several
decades. One of P. T. Barnum’s earliest traveling shows, in 1836, featured a
black singer and dancer named Sanford.62 Barnum’s circuses also sometimes
featured choruses of black jubilee singers, who performed spirituals. One show
included an act referred to as “Charley and Oscar, Zulus.”63 Most of the major
circuses toured with their own all-black sideshow band and minstrel troupe.
Under the sideshow tent, singers, dancers, comedians, and specialty acts
performed vaudeville-style entertainment, accompanied by all-black bands.64
Sideshow vaudeville incorporated many elements of the old minstrel shows, with
performers sometimes appearing in blackface.65 Like big shows and tented
minstrel shows, sideshow troupes often developed loyal followings from the black
communities in cities where they performed.66
61
Ibid., 6-7.
Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Out of Sight: The Rise of African-American Popular Music, 1889-1895
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 374.
63
Ibid.
64
Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 158-159.
65
Garvin Bushell (as told to Mark Tucker), Jazz from the Beginning (Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1988), 13.
66
Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 161.
62
22
Chapter 2: Jazz in Vaudeville, Beginnings to 1917
The variety theaters of the 1870s and 80s were usually small and often
had only a pianist to play the cues, incidental music, and accompaniment for all
of the acts. Many of these piano accompanists were skilled non-reading
musicians. Vaudevillian Joe Laurie claimed that many of the piano players in
those days did not read music, but that “about 80 per cent of all the old time
piano players could fake anything you could sing, hum, or whistle.”67 Both
reading and non-reading pianists in early vaudeville theaters likely made
extensive use of improvisation while accompanying a show, either to invent
completely new accompaniment (as non-reading pianists would have done) or to
make additions to preexisting sheet music. Embellishing the melody line or
thickening the harmonic texture of a given piece of sheet music would have
created a larger sound and helped to make up for the lack of more extensive
instrumentation. Joe Laurie remembered that Mike Bernard, the pianist in one of
Tony Pastor’s early vaudeville houses, “manipulated the ivories so that the
average pop song sounded like grand opera…He did what the professors would
call ‘extemporizing,’ but what me and Aggie would call ‘ad-libbing’ on the keys.”68
Pioneer jazz composer and pianist Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, who spent most
of his early career working in vaudeville, echoed this idea when describing his
67
Joe Laurie Jr., Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1953), 61.
68
Ibid.
23
own jazz piano style: “No jazz piano player can really play good jazz unless they
try to give an imitation of a band…”69
In his description of early vaudeville piano playing, Laurie draws
connections between the piano styles of vaudeville pianists who worked in Tony
Pastor’s theater and ragtime. The aforementioned Mike Bernard was evidently
an outstanding ragtime pianist, and “won a flock of medals at Tammany Hall,
where they would hold yearly ragtime piano-playing contests.”70 Slightly later,
Ben Harney, another influential ragtime pianist, would take the accompanist job
at Tony Pastor’s theater:
Ben Harney was the pioneer of ragtime music. Modern jazz and swing
stemmed from the same syncopation. His playing led to the ragtime craze
and the cakewalk craze using the same tempo…Ben learned [ragtime]
when he was in Louisville, mastered the syncopated rhythm, and came to
Pastor’s about 1895.71
Harney, a light-skinned black man who passed for white to work in Pastor’s
theater,72 was extremely important for his role in popularizing ragtime. As the
New York Times wrote in 1924, “…credit is due [Harney] because he played in a
first-class theatre before any other ragtime exponent.”73 Harney also published
the first ragtime instruction manual, Ragtime Instructor, in 1897.74 He was very
competitors challenged his position as originator of ragtime, Harney offered to
leave the music business and pay one hundred dollars to anyone who could
69
Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of
Jazz” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 63.
70
Joe Laurie, Vaudeville, 61.
71
Ibid., 62.
72
Edward A. Berlin, Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1980, 24.
73
“The Origin of Ragtime,” New York Times, March 23, 1924; Berlin, Ragtime, 24.
74
Berlin, Ragtime, 24.
24
present a rag older than his 1895 You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon but You’ve
Done Broke Down.75
Given the contemporary popularity of ragtime and their own experience
with the style, Ben Harney, Mike Bernard, and the other ragtime pianists who
worked in vaudeville houses probably accompanied shows either by improvising
new, ragtime-based parts or by adding improvised syncopation to a preexisting
musical material. The practice of adding syncopation to unsyncopated material
was known as “ragging.” Ragtime pianists often ragged pop tunes, marches,
and, in a particularly subversive practice, well-known pieces of classical music.
Critics often referred to this last practice, known as “ragging the classics,” as a
disgrace, but it was a reliable crowd-pleaser; pianists Jelly Roll Morton, Eubie
Blake, and James P. Johnson all included classical pieces in their ragtime
repertoires.76 One 1899 account describes Ben Harney ragging a few pieces,
demonstrating that he was a fluent ragtime improviser: “[Harney’s] performances
included the ‘ragging’ of such popular classics as Mendelssohn’s Spring Song,
Rubinstein’s Melody in F, and the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s ‘Cavalleria
Rusticana,’ which he would first play in their orthodox form. The effect was
startling.”77 It was probably not unusual, then, for Harney and other vaudeville
accompanists to render sheet music in a ragtime style.
Some vaudeville houses had small orchestras, usually of no more than
seven pieces, to accompany their shows. These early vaudeville orchestras
likely played a mixture of written and improvised music, depending on the
75
Ibid.
Ibid., 67-70.
77
Ibid., 67.
76
25
situation. A number of surviving repertoire books from Tony Pastor’s theater
provide clues to the instrumentation and repertoire of vaudeville orchestras. The
songs are typically arranged for two violins, trumpet, trombone, flute, and drums.
Each instrument has its own bound book of scores, suggesting that the orchestra
members would have read the music during the show.78 Touring acts that
performed in Pastor’s theater probably left behind the surviving arrangements.
The music covers a wide variety of genres and styles, including parody songs,
sentimental material, and folk songs such as “Irish Washerwoman” and “Garry
Owen.”79 The parody songs are humorous reworked versions of familiar popular
songs, and singers probably used the “ethnic” folk songs like “Irish
Washerwoman” and various German-inspired tunes in the “Irish” or “Dutch” acts
that were widely popular in vaudeville at the time.80 These remnants are only part
of the story and may not be an accurate representation of performance practice;
written arrangements such as those described were a basic framework on which
to build a performance. Singers or orchestra directors could alter them to
accommodate differences in instrumentation in a particular orchestra or to
compensate for an entertainer’s lack of singing ability.81
Musicians in the early vaudeville orchestras were remarkably versatile;
they had to be able to sight-read any scores that a traveling act might bring with
them while also improvising music to accompany those portions of the show that
78
Gillian M. Rodger, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century
(Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: The University of Illinois Press, 2010), 116.
79
Ibid., 117.
80
Ibid.
81
Ibid., 117-118.
26
did not include written parts. Vaudeville historian Douglas Gilbert writes that the
early vaudeville orchestras were “extraordinarily good”:
Actors almost never carried their own orchestration, except for a specialty.
Music for end songs, singles, and fill-ins was left to the ingenuity of the
orchestra. The absence of technique and the hit-or-miss attitude of the
actor (based upon the belief that a mummer’s life was but an interim of
earthly ad-libbing) often taxed the abilities of the musicians…All of them
had to be good readers and improvisers. Many of them were not only fine
soloists, but well grounded in harmony, counterpoint, and form.82
Improvisation occurred throughout a show, with the members of the orchestra
filling in those segments that had no written scores. To facilitate this practice,
vaudeville orchestras sometimes used cue sheets that gave instructions on
where to add sound effects or appropriate music. A typical cue sheet from an
early vaudeville show gave vary basic instructions for cues, such as “hurry
music,” “frenzied music,” and “clarinet squeal.” For the rising curtain at the start
of a show, a cue sheet might require that the orchestra play “lively music.”83
Probably the most important factor that allowed these orchestras to play
coherently was a shared repertoire of memorized musical material, including
clogs, hornpipes, reels, and jigs, which the musicians could “fake” in any key.84
This shared repertoire suggests that rather than playing completely
extemporaneously, early vaudeville orchestras created rudimentary
orchestrations based on tunes with which they were all intimately familiar and
which would fit a given situation onstage.
The disappearance of improvised cueing in mainstream vaudeville was a
side effect of B. F. Keith’s sanitized entertainment. Keith’s insistence on the
82
Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville: Its Life and Times (New York: Dover Publications, 1963), 32.
Ibid., 33.
84
Ibid., 32.
83
27
removal of impolite elements from variety performance also led to formalizedthrough composed orchestral accompaniment and the disappearance of
improvised cues, except under very specific circumstances. This change was a
natural result of changes in performance practice among vaudeville entertainers.
First, Keith’s insistence on precision and professionalism in his troupes meant
that actors were likely to follow the script exactly; musicians no longer had to be
prepared to accompany a surprise change in the program, so all of the music
could be prepared in advance. Second, the greater attention that orchestra
leaders paid to musical accuracy may have been a side effect of what Keith
called “the closer attention paid to stage setting and scenic embellishment
generally” and his avoidance of what he labeled “coarseness.”85 Gilbert notes
this important change in his history of vaudeville:
In the early days music cues were incessant. The actors were so
continually spattered with them it was hard to deliver an important line or
make a significant gesture without being slapped in the ears by one. The
actors raged, for often the audience could not hear the lines, but the
practice continued until the cues became such a nuisance they had to be
restricted to precise business. This was one of the few ‘refinements’ of
Keith and his ‘polite vaudeville’ colleagues that was really helpful.86
If vaudeville was to become respectable and family-friendly, vaudeville music
needed to be cleaner and more refined. The spontaneity that characterized the
early variety house orchestras (and early vaudeville generally) had become a
liability.
85
B. F. Keith, “The Vogue of the Vaudeville,” in American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries,
edited by Charles W. Stein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 20; Originally published in National
Magazine 9 (November 1898),146-153.
86
Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 33.
28
Because the all-black “Big Shows” like the Black Patti Troubadours and
the Smart Set performed in mainstream theaters on white vaudeville circuits,
many of which were owned by B. F. Keith, they made use of through-composed
music, like the white “polite vaudeville” troupes. Beyond a need to conform to the
expectations of mainstream vaudeville, the troupes may have had another
reason to strive for precision. As black entertainers performing for mostly-white
audiences at the turn of the 20th century, often called the “nadir of American race
relations,” the Big Shows must have wanted to present a sophisticated and
respectable image that would refute negative stereotypes of blacks in popular
culture. The Indianapolis Freeman’s review of Abyssinia, a black musical that
toured mainstream vaudeville theaters in the teens, displays an undercurrent of
racial pride and demonstrates the importance of written scores in these
productions:
…’Abyssinia’ is indeed a Negro play to be proud of, and the grand and
diversified score of music composed and arranged by Prof. Will Marion
Cooke…Bert Williams and…George W. Walker, along with Jesse A. Shipp
and a few other colored writers and performers are to be credited with the
final accomplishment of founding and substantiating a new school of
American comedy and also of music.87
In addition to concerns with ideology and conformity, there were practical
reasons for the Big Shows’ formalized music. The classical-music-influenced
pieces often featured in the shows made written scores more important for the
orchestra. This was especially true of the Black Patti Troubadours, which
87
Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon
Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 64.
29
featured the operatic work of black soprano Sissieretta Jones, the titular Black
Patti.
Small-time black vaudeville troupes, which operated largely in the black
community, away from Keith’s scrutiny, escaped his “polite vaudeville” reforms.
They sometimes presented suggestive songs and skits, and their orchestras
probably continued to play a mixture of improvised music and sheet music during
shows, in the manner of the early white vaudeville orchestras. These
Indianapolis Freeman88 classified ads from the early teens, which specify that all
applicants must both read music and improvise, illustrate that musicians in black
vaudeville were still performing in the old style:
AT LIBERTY! Clarinet, Piano, Saxophone That can Read, Improvise,
Transpose, and Fake. An experienced showman, vaudeville, stock or
road…89
WANTED! To Strengthen Band by Dixie Serenaders…trombone to
double, read, and fake…90
The incipient practice of jazz improvisation, which was appearing in black
communities around the South by the early 20th century, fit neatly into the
preexisting tradition of ensemble improvisation in vaudeville. Many influential but
little-known early jazz musicians worked as orchestra leaders for small-time
touring black vaudeville companies beginning in the first decade of the 20th
88
I rely on the Indianapolis Freeman as a primary source throughout this chapter. The Freeman is unique
in that it was among the earliest black newspapers to provide regular entertainment coverage, and
sometimes-featured dispatches from entertainment reporters in smaller cities throughout the South. This
provides the researcher with rare information on music in southern black communities that is unavailable
elsewhere.
89
Advertisement by Louis Pierce, Indianapolis Freeman, May 27, 1911.
90
Advertisement by F. X. Ralphe, Indianapolis Freeman, April 11, 1914.
30
century, when the Big Shows were also at the height of their popularity.
Interestingly, most of the orchestra leaders who later became prominent in jazz
circles were clarinet players; the most revered included William “King” Phillips,
Fred Kewley, and Wilbur Sweatman. Phillips was an influential but semilegendary figure among early jazz clarinetists and little is known about his
background. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky,91 a product of the same
thriving ragtime community that produced Ben Harney.92 He rose to prominence
while playing with vaudeville bands. Phillips was professionally active by 1907,
when, according to the Indianapolis Freeman, he was playing clarinet with the
Funny Folks Comedy Co. under the direction of bandmaster J. C. Turner.
Interestingly, he was not yet billed as “King;” the Freeman correspondent refers
to him simply as “William Phillips.”93 Phillips was being called “King” by 1909,
when the Freeman mentions him again in a regional dispatch. The article does
not mention him as part of a touring company, meaning that he may have settled
temporarily in Clarksdale, Mississippi.94
Starting in 1909 and continuing throughout the teens, Phillips became
busy playing with touring companies, including A. G. Allen’s Minstrels and W. C.
Handy’s circus band.95 He also became well known as a composer during this
period and was especially popular among circus and vaudeville bands; in 1915,
R. Roy Pope’s band featured three of his pieces: “The Florida Blues,” “Eagle
91
Walter Allen and Brian Rust (Revised by Laurie Wright), “King” Oliver (Essex, UK: Storyville
Publications and Co. Ltd., 1987), 8
92
Joe Laurie, Vaudeville, 62.
93
“Funny Folks Comedy Co,” Indianapolis Freeman, April 6, 1907.
94
“Clarksdale, Miss,” Indianapolis Freeman, June 26, 1909.
95
Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 135.
31
Rock Rag,” and “High Ball Rag.” J. E. Wolfscale’s band also featured “The
Florida Blues” in 1915.96 From 1919 to January 1920, Phillips was in Chicago.
He was Sidney Bechet’s replacement in King Oliver’s jazz band after Bechet left
to tour Europe with the Southern Syncopated Orchestra.97 Oliver specifically
requested that Phillips leave W. C. Handy’s group, where he was currently
working, and join him in Chicago.98 That King Oliver, by then a renowned jazz
cornetist with years of touring and performing experience, would send for Phillips
suggests that Phillips had a formidable reputation as an improviser by the late
teens. Phillips’s contemporaries have confirmed this point. In an interview with
Laurie Wright, early jazz musician Preston Jackson said that King Phillips’
playing style was very similar to that of Johnny Dodds, and that Phillips was as
good a musician as Dodds was.99 Jazz scholars and critics regard Dodds, who
recorded with such jazz luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and
King Oliver, as one of the greatest jazz clarinetists of the 1920s. Clarinetist
Buster Bailey, a veteran of the King Oliver and Fletcher Henderson bands,
remembered Phillips years later as “one of the first jazz clarinet players I ever
heard.”100
Fred Kewley, another jazz clarinetist who worked extensively in vaudeville,
was born in British Guiana, where he received formal musical training by two
96
Ibid., 166-170.
Allen and Rust, “King” Oliver, 8.
98
Ibid.
99
Ibid.
100
Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It
(New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966), 77.
97
32
bandmasters from the Kneller Hall College of Music in London.101 Kewley was
working as a professional musician by 1909, when he was traveling with Pat
Chappelle’s A Rabbit’s Foot Company.102 From 1909 to 1911, Kewley worked
with A. G. Allen’s Minstrels, together with William “King” Phillips; the two men
played together in the troupe’s saxophone quartet.103 In 1911, he joined Eph.
Williams’ Big City Minstrels. Kewley married his wife Elizabeth in 1912, and the
two of them toured with the Silas Green from New Orleans Company in 1914.
Kewley joined Alexander Tolliver’s heavily jazz-oriented group in 1916. While
working with Tolliver, he played with fellow jazz musicians Willie Hightower, Alvin
“Zoo” Robertson, and David Jones. Like “King” Phillips, his playing made a
lasting impression on all who heard it; Kewley was billed as the “best colored
clarinetist” in the Indianapolis Freeman,104 and clarinetist Garvin Bushell later
remembered him as the best black clarinet player in the country in the teens.105
The most famous and influential of the great black vaudeville clarinetists
was Wilbur C. Sweatman. Sweatman was born on February 7, 1882 in
Brunswick, Missouri to Coleman and Matilda Sweatman.106 He started playing
music at a young age after his older sister Eva, who later became a music
teacher, taught him to play the piano. In the next few years, Sweatman taught
himself to play the violin and then the clarinet.107 During Sweatman’s childhood in
101
“Fred Kewley,” Indianapolis Freeman, September 16, 1916; Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 136.
Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 135.
103
Ibid.
104
“Fred Kewley,” Indianapolis Freeman, September 16, 1916; Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 136.
105
Garvin Bushell (as told to Mark Tucker), Jazz from the Beginning (Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1988), 13.
106
Mark Berresford, That’s Got ‘Em! The Life and Music of Wilbur C. Sweatman (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2010), 12
107
Ibid., 13.
102
33
the 1880s and 90s, ragtime was developing nearby in Sedalia, Missouri, then
home to Scott Joplin. Sweatman would likely have heard the new music from
traveling ragtime pianists and ragtime bands that passed through Brunswick.
Ragtime was the most important influence on Sweatman’s playing, and he
continued to play in a ragtime style long after the music itself fell out of fashion.108
Another of Sweatman’s formative musical experiences came in 1894, when he
saw a group of West African singers and dancers perform in Kansas City. The
performers had come to Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair and had embarked on
a short tour of the Midwest immediately after the end of the Fair. The
performance evidently made a deep impression on Sweatman, as he was able to
clearly remember it more than sixty years later in a 1959 interview with Len
Kunstadt for Record Research.109
Sweatman’s professional career began around 1895, when he joined
Kansas bandmaster Nathaniel Clark Smith’s “Pickaninny Band.” An influential
music teacher, Smith was sometimes called “America’s greatest colored
bandmaster” by the contemporary press.110 After finishing his education in
London, Smith became a prominent music educator and musician, serving as a
National Guard bandmaster and music director at Booker T. Washington’s
Tuskegee Institute.111 While working as a music teacher, Smith taught many
students who later rose to fame as jazz musicians, including Earl Hines, Bennie
Moten, Walter Page, Ray Nance, Milt Hinton, Lionel Hampton, and Cab
108
Ibid., 15-16.
Ibid., 14.
110
Ibid., 18-20.
111
Ibid., 18.
109
34
Calloway.112 “Pickaninny acts,” or “pick acts,” including groups like Smith’s band,
were one of the main avenues that young black performers used to enter show
business in the early 20th century. “Pick acts” were often featured in mainstream
white vaudeville as a means of adding variety to mainly-white shows. These
groups mainly worked with female entertainers like Sophie Tucker and May
Irwin.113 “Pick acts” featured singers, dancer, and sometimes instrumentalists,
billed as “Pickaninny bands.”114 Probably the most famous entertainer to come
out of a “pickaninny act” was legendary dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. N. C.
Smith’s band was well-rehearsed and respected for its musicianship; according
to the November 2, 1895 Leavenworth Herald, John Philip Sousa called the
“Pickaninny Band” the “best kid band in the world.”115 Sweatman was probably
with the band in 1899, when it toured Australia and the South Pacific with the
famous vaudeville entertainer and songwriter Ernest Hogan.116
In 1902, Sweatman joined P. G. Lowery’s Concert Band, which was then
touring the country with the Forepaugh and Sells Bros. Circus sideshow.
Sweatman did double duty, playing violin in the orchestra as the orchestra leader
and playing clarinet in Lowery’s concert band.117 This job honed both
Sweatman’s music reading and his improvisational skills. During the shows, he
would have had to read Lowery’s arrangements of marches, waltzes, and
popular songs while also improvising to “follow” the acts onstage. Judging by
112
Ibid., 17.
Ibid.
114
Ibid., 18.
115
Ibid., 20.
116
Ibid., 21-24.
117
Ibid., 27.
113
35
black entertainer Tom Fletcher’s account of seeing Sweatman in the early 1900s,
he also probably improvised throughout the band’s pre-circus parades:
[Lowery’s band] made the parade in New York and the season Sweatman
was with the band the crowds that lined the side walks started following
the band just to hear Sweatman playing his clarinet. Everybody was
saying that they had never heard anybody play the instrument like that
before. Sweatman was the sensation of the parade.118
The above account, especially when read in light of Sweatman’s later claims to
have invented jazz, strongly suggests that Sweatman was engaged in an early
form of jazz improvisation; it is unlikely that a faithful realization of a standard
marching band clarinet part would have caused such a “sensation,” as Fletcher
puts it.
After spending a season with Lowery’s Concert Band, Sweatman left to
join Mahara’s Minstrels, playing in a band under the direction of W. C. Handy.
Composer and virtuoso cornetist Handy would soon become famous as the
“Father of the Blues.”119 During his stay with Mahara’s Minstrels, Sweatman
developed his oft-maligned trick of playing Ethelbert Nevin’s “The Rosary” on
three clarinets simultaneously. The stunt would become his signature for the rest
of his long career in show business.120
Sweatman left Handy’s group in 1903 to lead an orchestra at the Palace
Museum in Minneapolis. The Palace, a dime museum, was billed as “THE
ANCHORAGE FOR THE WORLD’S MARVELS—A SHELTER FOR NATURE’S
ODDITIES” and also housed a “freak show.” Sweatman’s band performed in one
of the Palace’s two theaters. In 1903, he made his first recordings at a local
118
Ibid., 27-32.
Ibid., 35.
120
Ibid., 37-38
119
36
music store, which included the first recorded version of Scott Joplin’s “Maple
Leaf Rag.” Unfortunately, few cylinders were issued at the time and no copies of
these recordings now exist. Because of the limited distribution of the recording
company and the nature of the early cylinder recording process (each individual
recording had to be played and cut separately), all copies of Sweatman’s first
cylinders probably disappeared years ago. Between 1907 and 1908 Sweatman
also toured around Minnesota and Wisconsin, where he played short
engagements with various small companies.121
When he moved to Chicago in 1908 to work as music director at the
Grand Theater, Sweatman found the largest audience yet for what evidence
suggests was his very early form of jazz. While working at the Grand, Sweatman
played clarinet in a trio which also included piano and drums.122 Sweatman’s
playing created quite a stir, just as it had several years earlier in Lowery’s concert
band, and many people who heard him during this period would recall later that
he was among the first to play jazz. In a 1925 article for the Chicago Defender,
bandleader Dave Peyton remembered:
In 1906 [sic] Mr. Sweatman played in a little picture house on S.
State St., in Chicago, called ‘The Little Grand Theater.’ In the orchestra
were three players—piano, drums and clarinet. Mr. Sweatman led the
band with the clarinet and was a sensation. White players would come to
his little house from all over the country to hear Sweatman moan on the
clarinet, and many of them would engage him to teach them how to do it.
His work at this house made it famous nationally, as all of the
musical papers spoke of this peculiar clarinetist. Little did we think that
Mr. Sweatman’s original style of playing would be adopted by the greatest
jazz artists of today; but it is and Mr. Sweatman can claim the honour of
being the first to establish it.123
121
Ibid., 40-44.
Ibid., 50.
123
Ibid. 51-52.
122
37
Theatrical agent Harrison Smith also said that Sweatman’s band at the Grand
Theater was “the talk of the town long before the arrival of the Creole Band,”
implying that it was Sweatman, and not the Creole Band which played in Chicago
several years later, who introduced jazz to the city.124 In January 1911,
Sweatman left the Grand and moved to the Monogram Theater. He played in
Chicago’s vaudeville theaters for a total of three years before he began working
in the touring vaudeville circuits. After leaving Chicago, he continued to
popularize early jazz, at first working exclusively in black theaters and small white
theaters. Starting in 1912, he began working in mainstream white vaudeville,
playing in major theaters as far north as Canada.125
In December 1916, Sweatman made his historic recording of his
composition “Down Home Rag,” probably the earliest surviving recording of jazz
improvisation. Sweatman, accompanied by a small group of studio musicians,
recorded “My Hawaiian Sunshine” and “Down Home Rag” for the Emerson
Phonograph Company in Manhattan. “Down Home Rag,” which was popular
enough to merit three printings between 1911 and 1913,126 is a typical example of
a late-period rag. It features a multithematic construction, with a four-bar
introduction and a four-bar interlude before the trio; the interlude modulates to
the subdominant:127
I
IV
124
Ibid., 52.
Ibid., 66-74.
126
Berlin, Ragtime, 149.
127
Wilber C. Sweatman, Down Home Rag (Chicago: Will Rossiter, 1911).
125
38
Intro AABBAA Interlude CCDDC
“Down Home Rag,” like other rags from the 1910s, features frequent use of
dotted rhythms in the A and B themes, instead of the eighth-note rhythms
common in rags from the previous decade. This change in rhythm reflects the
increased popularity and influence of the fox trot and the turkey trot, which
featured dotted rhythms.128
On his 1916 recording, Sweatman makes several alterations to the
original composition as defined by the published sheet music from 1911. He
shortens the form, probably in an effort to conform to the short playing time of
Emerson’s small disks. Beginning with the repeated B section, Sweatman
makes significant departures from the melody, usually on repeated sections.
Sweatman’s improvisations are most noticeable on the repeated C and D
sections, where he scarcely plays the melody at all. The form of Sweatman’s
1916 Emerson version of “Down Home Rag” is something like this:129
I
IV
Intro (Orchestra) AABB’ Interlude CC’DD’C’’
A comparison of the 1911 published version of “Down Home Rag” and
Sweatman’s 1916 recording shows that the Emerson recording is not only the
first jazz recording, but also an example of the energetic improvisation that
thrilled Sweatman’s audiences beginning in the early 1900s, when he was
working with P. G. Lowery. “Down Home Rag” is one of the few recorded
examples of jazz improvisation as it would have occurred in a vaudeville context.
128
Berlin, Ragtime, 149.
Wilbur C. Sweatman, Down Home Rag, Wilbur C. Sweatman accompanied by Emerson Trio, Emerson
5163, mx. 1201, take 1, ca. Dec. 1916.
129
39
Despite their importance to music history, Sweatman’s Emerson
recordings remain little known. They are obscure for two reasons. First, the
Emerson Company recorded using unusual small (six or seven-inch) disks that
featured nonstandard “universal cut” grooves; the company meant the disks to be
playable on any of the popular phonograph models, such as Victor, Columbia, or
Edison. Unfortunately, this innovation led to slow sales of Emerson recordings,
because consumers were unfamiliar and somewhat suspicious of “universal”
disks. To make matters worse, the Sweatman’s Emerson recordings received a
very limited release of no more than two years.130 For these reasons, copies of
Sweatman’s recording of “Down Home Rag” are rare, and scholars rarely discuss
its importance.
In addition to the outstanding solo work of musicians like Phillips, Kewley,
and Sweatman, jazz improvisation may also have appeared in several other
contexts in small-time black vaudeville. Traveling vaudeville troupes often
performed street parades, like the one in which Tom Fletcher remembered
seeing Wilbur Sweatman, to draw the attention of the local populace when they
arrived in a new town. These street parades were part of a tradition of pre-show
advertising that dated back to the early days of vaudeville. “Frequently,” Gilbert
Douglas writes, “the musicians played on the street in front of the theater before
the show opened.”131 The musicians meant their performance to attract a crowd,
possibly enticing them to attend one of the performances in the theater. Visiting
130
Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 (Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 342.
131
Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville: Its Life and Times (New York: Dover Publications, 1963), 3233.
40
troupes would typically stage their parades on the main street of the town in
which they had arrived; the uniformed musicians would march down the street in
formation, playing a popular tune. The music in these parades evidently featured
at least a limited amount of improvisation, as suggested by Tom Fletcher’s
anecdote on Sweatman and this description of a vaudeville parade from the
Indianapolis Freeman:
Promptly at 11:30 the mournful sound of a bugle call from the rear end of
car number 7 (Atlanta) was the warning for parade time. A few moments
later a lineup of beautiful long red coats with large Pearl buttons and high
silk hats including a number of high brown Soubrettes were waiting for the
tap of the drum. Very soon the Big concert band of 20 (the equestrienne)
was on its way to the heart of a city that has no heart. A large crowd
greeted the merry-makers. Suddenly a thunderous roar of an introduction
was heard. Then the shriek of a trombone following the Grand Pause
rattled off a cadenza for ‘Old Kentucky Home’ (a trombone solo)…132
The reporter’s description of a “rattled off” “cadenza” by the trombonist implies
that he improvised briefly before playing the melody of “Old Kentucky Home.”
That performances of “Old Kentucky Home” do not usually feature such an
introduction, and the reporter’s use of the word “cadenza,” often used as a
description of improvisatory material in Western art music, further support this
conclusion.
Small-time black vaudeville shows may have sometimes featured
improvised music under the catchall heading of “novelty acts.” Some novelty
acts involved some sort of musical element, such as playing homemade
instruments or playing traditional instruments in unusual ways, as in Wilbur
132
“Campbell’s New Orleans Minstrels,” Indianapolis Freeman, May 20, 1916.
41
Sweatman’s three-clarinet stunt. A 1911 Indianapolis Freeman dispatch raises
the possibility that some novelty acts made use of jazz improvisation:
Messrs. Fred Kewley, Robert Miller and Robt. H. Gant recently joined
hands in a new musical act. Mr. Kewley posing as the professor, Mr. Gant
as a musician looking for work and Mr. Miller doing comedy. Taken all in
all, the act is a complete success from beginning to end…133
Although the article makes no mention of the actual selections that Kewley
played (or if he played at all) in this musical act, that he was at the time one of
the most respected black clarinetists makes it unlikely that he would have
participated in a musical act without playing. Additionally, given that he was
onstage, it is unlikely that he would have been reading sheet music while also
attempting to act.
The small vaudeville troupes and bands that performed in circus
sideshows were also important in the development of many jazz musicians’
careers during these years. Black circus bandleaders, especially the most
prominent ones, like P. G. Lowery, R. Roy Pope, and J. E. Wolfscale, prided
themselves on the discipline and refined musicianship of their bands, probably to
counteract the demeaning minstrel-show conditions in which they worked. P. G.
Lowery’s Concert Band and Minstrel Company’s repertoire included classical
overtures, marches, waltzes, and patriotic compositions, as well as the popular
ragtime pieces of the day.134 Lowery was a friend of Scott Joplin and visited him
at his home in November 1901. He also used his circus band to popularize
Joplin’s music; Lowery’s Concert Band performed Joplin’s “Sunflower Slow Drag”
133
“Aboard A. G. Allen’s Private Car ‘999’,” Indianapolis Freeman, March 18, 1911.
Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark
Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 159.
134
42
in its 1901 tour and Joplin’s “A Breeze from Alabama,” which Joplin dedicated to
Lowery135, on its 1902 tour. “The late composition by Scott Joplin, ‘A Breeze from
Alabama,’” Lowery wrote the Freeman that year, “is a hit every where. It is fast
growing popular.”136
The best of the circus bands were always seeking legitimacy and respect
for their artistry. While working with Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey, J. E.
Wolfscale’s band reached the unheard-of size of thirty-two pieces, making it the
largest circus band then on the road.137 It was also well-rehearsed; the
Indianapolis Freeman praised this group in a 1914 article, stating that “Prof.
Wolfscale has shown the management of the greatest show on earth that with a
big number of colored musicians you can play concert music and other kinds and
with as much expression as the big show’s concert band.”138 Bandleader R. Roy
Pope was the first to completely eschew minstrelsy in his sideshow work, as a
Freeman correspondent noted in January 1911: “This aggregation…will by
persistent efforts of the efficient band director and cornetist, Prof. R. Roy Pope,
carry an exclusive concert band without minstrel…this season [Pope] takes the
initiative in eliminating the minstrel part.”139 A contemporary editorial that
appeared in the Freeman a year later illustrates the way that the black
community viewed Pope’s striving for dignity in his work:
135
Clifford Edward Watkins, Showman: The Life and Music of Perry George Lowery (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2003), 46.
136
Indianapolis Freeman, September 6, 1902; Ibid., 45-46.
137
Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 168.
138
“Notes From Wolfscale’s Band, With Barnum and Bailey,” Indianapolis Freeman, August 8, 1914;
Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 168.
139
“Negro Concert Band With Ringling Bros.’ Circus,” Indianapolis Freeman, January 21, 1911; Ragged
but Right, 164.
43
In each and every city Prof. Pope is highly praised for having the best
band of its size ever traveling with a circus…both in appearance and
conduct and ability. It would be very nice, indeed, if some of our other
colored band leaders would drop that old ‘Befo’ De Wah’ dope and
advance as the world does… [Bandleaders should] try and help the world
forget forty-five years ago.140
In keeping with the idea that circus bands should try to present a dignified and
disciplined approach to black musicianship, most of the high-level circus
bandleaders insisted that their musicians read music. Entertainer Tom Fletcher
remembers that:
“When you joined a show as a musician there was never any band
rehearsal. The band leader, when parade time came, would pass out the
books that had all of the tunes, but with the names of the tunes cut off.
The idea was to see whether you had told the truth about being a
bandsman. When everyone had his book the leader would give the signal
to start playing the march. [Then the leader] would get a chance to see
who was cheating or who wasn’t a good music reader.
Less prominent sideshow bands appear to have been less demanding about the
reading ability of their musicians and probably made considerable use of
improvisation and playing by ear. According to a correspondent from the
Freeman, indiscriminate improvisation from musicians in sideshow bands had
become a nuisance by the mid teens: “…as a rule most side show managers just
want noise from a colored band. The reason for this is because they don’t have
a large enough band to do anything but jam.”141 Clarinetist Garvin Bushell spoke
of playing what sounded like very rough arrangements of popular songs and
blues during his time in the Sells-Floto Circus; material like this also could have
included ample room for melodic embellishment and improvisation:
140
“Notes from Ringling Bros.’ Circus Annex,” Indianapolis Freeman, July 20, 1912; Ragged but Right,
164.
141
“Notes From Wolfscale’s Band, With Barnum and Bailey,” Indianapolis Freeman, August 8, 1914;
Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 168.
44
When we arrived in a town we’d ride on a wagon for the parade and play
“Beale Street Blues” or “The Memphis Blues” or “The Entertainer” in fast
tempo, or else some old military marches. Other bands played them two
to the bar, we’d play them four to the bar…We played “Rubber-necked
Moon,” out of the Smart Set show, “How Do You Do, Miss Mandy?,” and
“Snag It,” which Joe Oliver used to play.142
The long list of jazz musicians who received their early training in circus
bands supports the idea that circus bands made some use of improvisation
during performances. Wilbur Sweatman, Willie “Bunk” Johnson, Willie
Hightower, Alvin “Zoo” Robertson, Lorenzo Tio Sr., Charles Creath, Jasper
Taylor, and Buddy Petit all spent time touring with circuses. In the 1980s, long
after circus bands had faded from popularity, Garvin Bushell would remember:
“There were some great black clarinet players with circuses in those days.
Percy Glascoe from Baltimore was one, and Fred Kewley from Detroit was
another. Outside of players in the Jenkins’ Orphanage Band, Kewley was
the best black clarinet player in the country…Those guys had a style of
clarinet playing that’s been forgotten. Ernest Elliott had it, Jimmy O’Bryant
had it, and Johnny Dodds had it.143
Bushell’s memories of circus clarinetists specifically associate them with later,
more well knows jazz clarinetists such as Johnny Dodds, further strengthening
the idea that music resembling early jazz was present in the music of the black
circus bands. And, when taken with Preston Jackson’s comparison of William
“King” Smith’s playing style to Johnny Dodds’s, it raises the interesting possibility
that Johnny Dodds’s recordings (together with those of Wilbur Sweatman) are
some of the closest things modern researchers have to recorded examples of
circus and vaudeville clarinet style.
142
Garvin Bushell (as told to Mark Tucker), Jazz from the Beginning (Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1988), 11-12.
143 Bushell, Jazz from the Beginning, 13.
45
Chapter 3: Jazz in Vaudeville, 1917-1940
The Creole Band was the first jazz ensemble to work in mainstream
vaudeville. It consisted of New Orleans musicians who had relocated to
California between 1908 and 1914,144 including bassist William Johnson, violinist
Jimmy Palao, trombonist Eddie Vincent, guitarist Norwood Williams, cornetist
Freddie Keppard, and, at various times, clarinetists George Baquet, Louis Delille,
and Jimmy Noone. Johnson organized the band and served as its manager.145
The Creole Band also featured the singing and dancing of entertainer Henry
Morgan Prince, who left in early 1917.146 They toured vaudeville from 1914 to
1918.147
The Creole Band began working in vaudeville after two of vaudeville
manager Alexander Pantages’ assistant managers heard them perform at a
boxing match at Doyle’s Training Camp in Vernon, California, just outside of Los
Angeles.148 The Pantages theater chain, though not an organization on the level
of the Keith or Orpheum circuits, was a major force in vaudeville in the western
United States and Canada, from California to Kansas City and as far north as
Vancouver and Manitoba.149 The Creole Band traveled the Pantages circuit with
four other acts: an “Irish” act, a novelty dancer, a juvenile act featuring chorus
girls, and a singing act centered around baseball. Pantages bundled multiple
144
Lawrence Gushee, Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), 61-78.
145
Ibid., 23-59.
146
Ibid., 50-53.
147
Ibid., 231.
148
Ibid., 88-95.
149
Ibid., 103-104.
46
acts together for more efficient travel over the long distances between the
theaters on his circuit.150
The band’s act drew heavily on old minstrel show routines and
conventions. They performed in front of a “plantation” backdrop, which depicted
a cotton field, a river, a cornfield, a church, and a log cabin. Henry Morgan
Prince donned blackface, dressed as an old man, and performed an energetic
buck-and-wing151 with a live chicken. The instrumentalists sang in four-part
harmony and performed a repertoire including “Egyptia,” “Old Black Joe,” and
“Ballin’ the Jack.”152 That a band as exciting and original as the Creole Band had
to package its music in a hackneyed minstrel show routine brings up an
interesting point about jazz’s place in vaudeville. Even after jazz became a
popular music for dancing and listening in the late teens, jazz bands in vaudeville
did not exist as strictly musical acts, but rather as one part of a more elaborate
act that might include a dancer, singer, or comedian. Historian Lawrence
Gushee wrote that
Musical acts—that is, ones based on the playing of a collection of
instruments—were pretty much obligated to have gimmicks, such as
elaborate, often exotic, costumes or peculiar instruments, or to present
their acts in a kind of choreography. The lesson that had to be learned
was that the vaudeville audience was not there to be edified, as at a
concert, but to be entertained. And music without words is not that
entertaining by itself.153
150
Ibid., 104.
According to Marshall and Jean Stearns’s Jazz Dance, the buck-and-wing was a combination of softshoe, clog dancing, and jig that was popular with minstrel performers.
152
Ibid., 105-106.
153
Ibid., 12.
151
47
Other examples of early jazz bands that situated their music within the broader
context of comedy, song, or dance include Tom Brown’s Band from Dixieland,
who performed with dancer Joe Frisco,154 the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, who
performed with vocalist and dancer Bee Palmer,155 and the Original Memphis
Five, who accompanied dancers Vi Quinn and Frank Farnum.156
Another important early jazz band was Bert Kelly’s Jazz Band, which
began working in vaudeville soon after the Creole Band began touring the
Pantages circuit. Bert Kelly was a white banjoist based in Chicago.157 He later
became a club owner; his club, Kelly’s Stables, hosted seminal jazz clarinetist
Johnny Dodds, among others.158 Kelly and his six-piece jazz band started
working in vaudeville theaters in Chicago around 1915. Vaudevillian Joe Laurie
would later credit Kelly with starting the jazz band craze in vaudeville. Laurie
noted that after Kelly’s band’s debut, “there were thousands that followed him”
and “there were about two dozen acts in vaude using their own [jazz] bands for
accompaniment instead of just having a piano player.”159 Laurie’s anecdote
seems to indicate that Kelly’s band was directly responsible for the influx of jazz
bands to vaudeville, but because of his failure to provide dates, it could be that
the jazz craze in vaudeville to which he refers started a couple of years later, with
the commercial success of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s first recordings.
154
Richard M. Sudhalter, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 9.
155
Ibid., 30.
156
Ibid., 106.
157
Ibid., 8.
158
Ibid., 9.
159
Joe Laurie Jr., Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1953), 71.
48
Kelly himself claimed both to have coined the phrase “jazz band” and to
have inspired the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to refer to themselves as a jazz
band:
This was in the fall of 1916, and [Kelly’s] band from White City was the
first band ever to be advertised as a “jazz” band. It was a big success,
and in the spring of 1917 James sent to New Orleans for the Original
Dixieland Jazz Band and insisted upon their using the words “Jazz Band.”
This was in 1917, and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was the first New
Orleans band to use the term, while Bert Kelly used it in 1915. Bert Kelly
had about twenty orchestras known as Bert Kelly’s Jazz Band, and when
the Dixieland arrived they adopted their name of “Original Dixieland Jazz
Band.”160
The word “jazz” probably first appeared in San Francisco at around the
turn of the century, where it meant either “energy” or “enthusiasm” or had a more
explicit sexual connotation. Chicago advertisers were referring to bands as “jazz”
bands as early as 1914, when clarinetist Bud Jacobson remembered seeing an
advertisement for a jazz band at Chicago’s Arsonia Café.161 Kelly’s most
important contribution, then, was not in being the first to lead a jazz band, it was
in being among the first to refer to his music as jazz music in a high-profile
vaudeville context, thus popularizing the new label. Most of his contemporaries’
jazz bands played in restaurants for dancers rather than in large theaters.
A brief review of a Bert Kelly performance at Chicago’s Wilson Theater
from a 1917 issue of Variety gives an idea of the context in which Kelly’s Jazz
Band performed:
Bert Kelly and his College Inn Jazz Band, with Lillian Watson, scored a
happy hit. Kelly’s musicians played some snappy, lively numbers, while
160
Literary Digest, “Stale Bread’s Sadness Gave ‘Jazz’ to the World,” in Jazz in Print (1856-1929): An
Anthology of Selected Early Readings in Jazz History, edited by Karl Koenig (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press,
2002), 132, originally published April 26, 1919.
161
Sudhalter, Lost Chords, 8-9.
49
Miss Watson did several songs enthusiastically applauded. Both Kelly
and Miss Watson are big local favorites, and their combined strength
made the turn seem unusually strong.162
Kelly’s Jazz Band shared the bill with a “Dutch” act, a pair of singing sisters, and
a mind reader.163
That so many of Kelly’s competitors worked in restaurants in large
Northern cities underlines the frequent association of early white jazz bands with
restaurants, which in urban areas occasionally served as meeting places for
entertainers. Many restaurants of the period doubled as cabarets. They had a
band for dancing and sometimes featured spontaneous vaudeville-style
entertainment as well, if there was a famous vaudevillian in the house. As
actress and singer Sophie Tucker wrote in her autobiography,
We had no master of ceremonies in those days. At all the hot spots the
proprietor kept things going. Usually whenever any professional
entertainers came in he recognized them and would call on them to come
out on the floor and entertain the crowd. It was free entertainment,
impromptu, and it created a feeling of camaraderie.164
In December 1916, Tucker became one of the first vaudeville stars to work
regularly in a restaurant, where she fronted a jazz band:
The Boss sold [Reisenweber’s restaurant in New York, where the Original
Dixieland Jazz Band worked about a month later] the idea of giving the
customers something different in entertainment—a vaudeville headliner, a
woman who could sing and with her own band. It was a new idea, but it
worked…We opened two days before Christmas, 1916. We entertained
during the dinner hour and put on a late show. My band played for the
162
Variety. 1917. Editorial. April 13.
Ibid.
Sophie Tucker, Some of These Days: The Autobiography of Sophie Tucker (New York: Doubleday,
Doran and Company, Inc., 1945), 138.
163
164
50
dancing during dinner and again during the supper hour. Another band
relieved them until the supper crowd came in.165
After Tom Brown’s Band from Dixieland experienced success playing for dancers
at Lamb’s Café in Chicago, several other New Orleans groups traveled to the city
to play in cabarets. These included Stein’s Band from Dixie, the Original
Dixieland Jazz Band, and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings.166 Some of these
bands would combine cabaret work with stints in more traditional vaudeville
settings. An example is Brown’s Band from Dixieland, which occasionally played
in vaudeville theaters while also working at Lamb’s Café.167
The release of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s first recordings on
March 7, 1917 was a singularly important moment in jazz history, marking the
“official” start of recorded jazz. The band consisted of white New Orleans natives
who had moved to Chicago to work, including cornetist Nick LaRocca, clarinetist
Larry Shields, trombonist Eddie Edwards, pianist Henry Ragas, and drummer
Tony Sbarbaro.168 They were playing for dancers at Reisenweber’s restaurant in
New York when Columbia Records approached them with an offer to record.
The ODJB played for a recording session at the Columbia studio on January 30,
but Columbia executives deemed the resulting recordings (the early jazz
standards “Indiana” and “Darktown Strutters’ Ball”) offensive and decided against
releasing them.169 On February 26, they recorded “Livery Stable Blues” and
165
Ibid., 156.
Sudhalter, Lost Chords, 3-28.
167
Ibid., 9.
168
Ibid., 13.
169
Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Jazz: A History of America’s Music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2005), 56-60.
166
51
“Dixieland Jass Band One-Step” for Victor. These recordings were released on
March 7, 1917 and went on to sell over a million copies,170 marking the start of
America’s jazz craze.
The number of jazz bands in New York City exploded almost overnight,
prompting a journalist to write in a humorous editorial for the New York Sun that
The Jazzbo reign of schrecklichkeit in the Broadway restaurants extends
from the Circle to the Square and up most of the side streets. Sagacious
restaurateurs during the Jazzbo numbers are now serving ear muffs on
request to fractious patrons who insist on retaining their hearing. The
difficulties of dinner conversation increased so rapidly after the Jazz bands
came in that ever tête-à-tête table communication had to be abandoned
for a form of sign language.171
In 1920, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band returned from a tour of England to find
a new crowd of imitators on the New York vaudeville and cabaret scene,
including the Louisiana Five, the St. Louis Five, the Domino Five, the Frisco Jass
Band, and the Original New Orleans Jazz Band.172 Sudhalter points out in his
history of early white jazz musicians that the proliferation of “Fives” was a direct
response to the popularity of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Countless new
bands, both black and white, sought to imitate the ODJB’s instrumentation and
command of novelty effects.173
The pronounced effects of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s popularity
and the resulting jazz craze would remain evident in vaudeville for the next
several years, both in the presence of small novelty jazz groups and in the
170
Ibid., 64.
Editorial in New York Sun, reprinted in Kansas City Star, April 13, 1917.
172
Ward, Jazz, 76.
173
Sudhalter, Lost Chords, 24.
171
52
playing style of the pit orchestras. According to Metronome magazine, there
were over seventy-five jazz orchestras playing in vaudeville by 1923.174
Beginning immediately after the release of the 1917 Dixieland Jazz Band
recordings and continuing into the 1920s, those pit and dance orchestras not
strictly devoted to jazz often hired a “hot” jazz soloist—usually a trumpeter—to
inject excitement into otherwise tame arrangements. Examples of this practice
include trumpeter Louis Panico’s work with the Isham Jones Orchestra,
trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, and trumpeter
Louis Armstrong with the early Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. Cornetist Ray
Lopez remembers playing this role in the pit orchestra at Keith’s Majestic Theatre
in New York in 1917:
…I stood up on a chair in the pit and waved a derby hat over the bell of
my cornet, producing a weird effect (so I’ve been told)…I had transformed
that staid pit band into a really hot jazz band…175
The next important stylistic development in jazz—and jazz as vaudeville
entertainment—would come not from the energetic small groups of the teens and
early twenties, but from the pit and dance orchestras that had adopted
syncopated music and jazz elements in response to the jazz craze sparked by
the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. This process of adoption is evident as early as
1910 in the work of black bandleader James Reese Europe, whose 105-piece
Clef Club Orchestra performed spirituals and traditional African-American music
174
David Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2009), 37.
175
Sudhalter, Lost Chords, 24.
53
as well as new, syncopated styles like ragtime and show tunes. In 1914, Europe
took a 10-piece ensemble on the road, performing syncopated dance music to
accompany the famous dance team of Vernon and Irene Castle.176 Various small
ensembles, which Europe drew from the membership of his black musicians’
union in New York City, the Clef Club, proved extremely popular at dances
around New York.177 Europe, who was a trained violinist and pianist an later
served as an officer and band leader in World War I,178 was making a conscious
effort to make the general American public aware of the beauty of black music.
Europe would later state that it was black composers’ duty to write music
reflective of their own culture rather than attempting to conform to Eurocentric
compositional ideals:
I have come back from France [after World War I] more firmly convinced
than ever that Negroes should write Negro music. We have our own racial
feeling and if we try to copy whites we will make bad copies…if we are to
develop in America we must develop along our own lines. Our musicians
do their best work when using Negro material. Will Marion Cook, William
Tires, even Harry Burleigh and [Samuel] Coleridge-Taylor are not truly
themselves in the music which expresses [sic] their race.179
After his service in World War I, Europe began to incorporate jazz into his music
for the Clef Club Orchestra. Europe died in 1919, when his experiments were
still in their very early stages.180 His music as preserved on records—his
176
Ward, Jazz, 57-59.
Ibid.
178
Ibid.
179
Literary Digest, “A Negro Explains ‘Jazz’,” in Jazz in Print (1856-1929): An Anthology of Selected
Early Readings in Jazz History, edited by Karl Koenig (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2002), 132, originally
published April 26, 1919.
180
Ward, Jazz, 70.
177
54
orchestra was the first black one to record181—was still in the older orchestral
ragtime style at the time of his death, but his work with vernacular AfricanAmerican styles paved the way for later dance bands, which successfully
incorporated varying degrees of jazz into their arrangements.
Probably the best known and commercially successful of these early jazzinfluenced dance orchestras was that of Paul Whiteman. Whiteman was the son
of a respected Colorado music educator. As a young man, he played viola in the
San Francisco Symphony.182 While in San Francisco, Whiteman heard jazz
performed in a club in the city’s Barbary Coast neighborhood.183 He quickly
resolved to “make a lady of jazz” by combining jazz with classical and dance
band influences, while also attempting to remove the social stigma that jazz
carried at that time. In fact, Whiteman’s most important contribution to jazz
history was in his blending of the classical and jazz traditions, which led him to
commission “Rhapsody and Blue” from George Gershwin.184 Whiteman’s
synthesis of classical music and jazz would influence the Third Stream
movement of the 1940s and 50s, which sought to combine jazz with modern
classical music. Billed as the “King of Jazz” during the 1920s, Whiteman would
later draw criticism from historians for his bands’ “watered-down” and classical
music-influenced style. Whiteman’s band remains one of the most important in
jazz history, however, because of the advanced arrangements of Bill Challis and
181
Ibid., 59.
Ibid., 99
183
Ibid.
184
Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 90.
182
55
the contributions of some of the era’s most important white jazz musicians,
including Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer, and Bing Crosby.185
Another, even more influential band was that of black bandleader Fletcher
Henderson, who initially modeled his orchestra on that of Paul Whiteman. Using
the innovative arrangements of alto saxophonist Don Redman, Fletcher
Henderson’s Orchestra established the standard swing band instrumentation
(saxophone, trumpet, trombone, and rhythm sections) and the standard big band
arranging practice of pitting the band’s sections against each other. Redman
achieved this effect by writing complicated ensemble passages for each section
to play as a group and interlocking the ensemble choruses of the different
sections. Redman’s arranging style, combined with the work of soloists including
at various times Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Roy
Eldridge, Buster Bailey, and Sidney Catlett, made Henderson’s orchestra among
the most influential in jazz history.
The new jazz influenced dance orchestras often accompanied acts in
shows called revues, particularly in New York City. The difference between
vaudeville and its parallel genre, the revue, had always been vague, but by the
mid-twenties, the distinction between traditional vaudeville and revue had
become especially muddled. American revues developed out of vaudeville and
burlesque entertainment in New York City in the late 19th century.186 The first
important revue was Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies of 1907, the first show in the long
185
Ibid., 89-90.
Andrew Lamb, et al. "Revue." In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/23288 (accessed September 28, 2012).
186
56
run of the famous Ziegfeld Follies.187 The show was spectacular, with impressive
sets and costumes, appearances by famous entertainers, a large cast, and a
chorus of beautiful women.188 Like earlier revues, it was a satire on the previous
season of New York theatrical productions and featured a mixture of humorous
songs, dances, satirical sketches, and specialty acts, making it very similar in
style and content to a traditional vaudeville show.189
Although it is difficult to draw a definite line between vaudeville and revue,
there were some important differences between the two genres. Revues
featured more unified thematic content, usually focused on a particular theatrical
season or other theme. They performed mainly on Broadway in New York City,
and had much larger budgets than most vaudeville shows. The difference
between vaudeville and revue becomes even more difficult to discern by the midtwenties, because advertisers and journalists were sometimes using the words
“vaudeville” and “revue” interchangeably, as in these examples from the New
York Sun:
Ned Wayburn’s famous vaudeville revues, “The Honeymoon Cruise” and
“The Demi-Tasse Revue,” will open the first week in September for a full
season’s bookings. They are the most popular musical acts in vaudeville,
playing extended and repeat engagements everywhere.190
New Brighton—Gus Edwards with his annual song revue heads the new
bill of oceanside vaudeville.191
187
Ibid.
Ibid.
189
Ibid.
190
New York Sun, “The Weyburn Revues,” August 20, 1925.
191
New York Sun, “Brooklyn Theaters,” June 20, 1925.
188
57
Another confusing example, from a 1928 advertisement in a Kansas newspaper,
mentions a “Midnight Vaudeville Revue.”192 Traditional vaudeville and revues had
become nearly indistinguishable; as early as 1923, the New York Times noted
that
The sole difference, in fact, between vaudeville and the revue is the
reappearance of individual performers in several scenes in the revue, the
general lavish tone in which the revue proceedings are conducted, and the
absence of vaudeville’s dumb acts.193
Historical accounts, then, indicate that by the 1920s, the revue was essentially a
better-funded incarnation of vaudeville. Jazz bands played an important role in
many revues of the period, and for the purposes of this study, I will categorize
revues under the larger heading of vaudeville-style entertainment, as I have done
in Chapter 2 with circus sideshows.
In the mid-twenties, following the success of several novels and theatrical
productions that sensationalized life in Harlem, the neighborhood experienced a
sudden influx of tourism. This in turn led to the growth of a number of clubs,
including the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Small’s Paradise. The larger
cabarets staged elaborate revues, with comedians, singers, dancers, and chorus
lines accompanied by jazz orchestras.194 The entertainment at the large Harlem
nightclubs featured he best black jazz bands in the country and centered on
exoticised and stereotypical depictions of African-American life and culture.
192
Advertisement in Topeka Plaindealer, September 21, 1928.
New York Times, “The Modern Revue And How It Is Put Together,” September 16, 1923.
194
Samuel B. Charters and Leonard Kunstadt, Jazz: A History of the New York Scene (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1981), 193-196.
193
58
Many dance bands during this period worked nightly accompanying
revues and floorshows in the extravagant Harlem nightclubs or worked in
theaters to supplement jobs playing for dancers in ballrooms. The most famous
jazz band to work steadily in nightclub revues was the Duke Ellington Orchestra,
which first rose to prominence as the house band at Harlem’s Cotton Club.
Ellington’s orchestra, which had earlier accompanied the floorshow at the Club
Kentucky, began working at the Cotton Club in the summer of 1927.195 The
Cotton Club, which was New York’s most famous nightclub in the 1920s and 30s,
first opened in 1920 as the Club Deluxe, owned by former heavyweight champion
Jack Johnson. After purchasing the club in 1922, Owney Madden changed its
name to the Cotton Club. The club became famous for its elaborate revues, its
beautiful light-skinned chorus girls, and its whites-only policy. It remained more
or less consistently in business until its final closure in 1940.196 While working at
the Cotton Club, Ellington’s orchestra accompanied the fifteen-act Cotton Club
Revue. They also performed a flashy overture at the beginning of each show
and played two or three pieces in between the other acts.197 By the end of 1927,
thanks to both the Cotton Club shows and recordings and radio broadcasts,
audiences and the press regarded Ellington’s orchestra as second only to the
Fletcher Henderson Orchestra.198
195
Ibid., 217.
"Nightclubs and other venues." In The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd ed., edited by Barry Kernfeld.
Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/J330000pg38 (accessed October 2,
2012).
197
Charles and Kunstadt, Jazz, 218-219.
198
Ibid., 218.
196
59
During his residency at the club, Ellington also found vaudeville work
elsewhere. In addition to their nightly work at the Cotton Club, the New York Age
reported that the entire Cotton Club Revue would occasionally leave the club to
perform at different venues around New York City:
Oftimes the orchestra and the revue are taken for an hour or so to
different functions to ‘strut their stuff.’ On these occasions, when
necessary, an outside orchestra is hired to play and hold the crowd until
Duke gets back on the job. Usually Duke gives the subbing to Willie
Lynch, a drummer…Lynch would hire the men and be leader on the job.199
For example, Ellington appeared at the Central Republican Club’s Annual Ball on
February 23, 1929, with the entire Cotton Club Revue and “several well known
vaudeville actors.”200 At around the same time, the New York Age published a
description of a revue at Harlem’s Lincoln Theatre in which Ellington and his
orchestra appeared:
With the Cotton Club Band on the stage and Ralph Cooper as the genial
master of ceremonies, the new management of the Lincoln Theatre
presented to its patrons the second edition of the Junior Blackbirds of
Harlem.
No play has been so well received at the Lincoln Theatre within the
reviewer’s memory. Gorgeously costumed and with dazzling scenery, this
revue represents the finest of the ‘presentation’ type of entertainment
which is finding such favor in the motion picture palaces of the country.
There is a wealth of comedy in the show, while the dancing and music are
infinitely better than any presented to Lincoln Theatre audiences in two
years.
The work of the Cotton Club Band was particularly appreciated, its
version of a Southern camp meeting bringing down storms of applause.201
199
Percival Outram, “Activities Among Union Musicians,” New York Age, January 26, 1929.
New York Age, “Central Republican Club’s Annual Ball Attracts Large Crowd,” March 2, 1929.
201
New York Age, “Many Improvements Being Made At Lincoln.” March 30, 1929.
200
60
Nearly every other medium-to-large sized cabaret in New York City during
the twenties and thirties featured some sort of vaudeville entertainment
accompanied by a black jazz orchestra. Other than Ellington and his orchestra,
two of the most famous jazz figures to work in revues were Cab Calloway, whose
orchestra replaced Ellington’s at the Cotton Club when Ellington left in 1931,202
and Fletcher Henderson, whose orchestra worked in revues in addition to its
regular job playing New York ballrooms. The New York Age published a glowing
review of a Henderson Orchestra performance as part of a 1928 revue at the
Lafayette Theatre:
There comes a time in every reviewer’s life when the English language
fails him in his efforts to do justice to a particularly inspiring show. This is
the case now when attempting to describe Leonard Harper’s new revue hit
‘Jazz Phantasy’ which opened a week’s engagement at the Lafayette
Theatre Monday. And the trouble arises from the fact that the greatest of
all bands—Fletcher Henderson’s Roseland Orchestra—weaves such an
entrancing spell about the revue that one feels as if he were treading on
air and cannot adequately describe his feelings…203
White jazz orchestras also found work in theatrical revues and vaudeville
during the twenties and thirties, although black groups dominated the famous
Harlem nightclubs. Orchestras such as Paul Whiteman’s and Jean Goldkette’s
had worked in vaudeville and revues throughout the 1920s. Increasing numbers
of white jazz ensembles began to work in Broadway musicals and revues after
the onset of the Great Depression, when work became scarcer. In the early
1930s, for example, a smaller version of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra was
playing for shows at the Roxy Theatre. The pit orchestras for the Gershwin
202
203
Charles and Kunstadt, Jazz, 247.
Ibid., 204.
61
musicals Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy featured such famous jazzmen as
Benny Goodman, Red Nichols, Glenn Miller, and Gene Krupa.204
Jazz ensembles as they appeared in theatrical settings of this period
differed from the traditional jazz orchestra format as established by bands like the
early Fletcher Henderson Orchestra but were still identifiably rooted in traditional
jazz band instrumentation. A jazz orchestra would often add a string section, and
sometimes auxiliary brass, for vaudeville work. For example, a major catalyst in
the breakup of the classic late twenties edition of the Fletcher Henderson
Orchestra came when Henderson added an all-white string section and a white
conductor to play a revue in a Philadelphia theater.205 Other jazz orchestras to
add string sections for theatrical engagements included Sam Wooding’s
Orchestra, which toured Europe with the Chocolate Kiddies revue,206 and Leroy
Tibbs’ Orchestra, which accompanied the floorshow at Connie’s Inn in Harlem.207
The end of jazz’s long relationship with vaudeville entertainment came
because of vaudeville’s decline, in the form of widespread theater closings, and
because of jazz’s transformation in the 1940s from a popular music to a concert
music, which led to the dissipation of significant jazz activity even in the surviving
Broadway revues. White vaudeville went into decline in 1929 and eventually
disappeared because of the stock market crash, which severely curtailed
204
Sudhalter, Lost Chords, 343.
Charles and Kunstadt, Jazz, 182
206
Ibid., 202.
207
Ibid., 204
205
62
revenues for all forms of white entertainment,208 and the steadily increasing
influence of the new film and radio industries. Black vaudeville shows did not
feel the effects of the economic crisis until the early 1930s. This was because
black shows tended to have lower budgets than the more spectacular white
revues. Black productions concentrated on music and dance, meaning that they
didn’t require as many costumes or props and were much less costly to
produce.209 Traveling revues continued to play in an ever-dwindling number of
vaudeville theaters until the late 1930s, when most white and black theaters were
showing films exclusively.
Additionally, the wide popularity of swing bands by the late 1930s
undermined jazz bands’ traditional role in vaudeville as accompaniment or one of
many acts making up a complete show. White bandleader Benny Goodman’s
famous success at Los Angeles’s Palomar Ballroom in 1935 marked the
beginning of the Swing Era. Big band dance music would remain the most
popular music in America through the rest of the 1930s and into the 40s.210
Swing’s wide popularity as dance music—and music for listening, as in
Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert211—led to a decisive shift away from
theater work and towards ballrooms and concert halls. Large jazz ensembles
were now popular enough to work exclusively as standalone entertainment,
unlike the bands of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which often worked both in
208
Nadine George-Graves, The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of
Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900-1940 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000),
108-109.
209
Ibid., 108.
210
Gioia, The History of Jazz, 145.
211
Ibid., 152.
63
ballrooms and in vaudeville. The modern jazz movement of the 1940s served to
reorient jazz as concert music, marking the genre’s final move away from show
business as exemplified by vaudeville and revues.
Chapter 4: Vaudeville in Jazz
One of the most obvious vestiges of vaudeville that frequently appears in
jazz recordings and descriptions of jazz performances is humorous dialogue or
skits, either bookending the music or interspersed throughout the performance.
These skits are a holdover from jazz’s early days in vaudeville, when
musicians—particularly black musicians—needed to couch their new, unfamiliar,
and potentially subversive music within a more conventional entertainment
framework, such as minstrelsy. The most prominent early example of this
practice comes from the Creole Band, which performed its music in front of a
plantation backdrop and incorporated a minstrel-style skit featuring blackface
entertainer Henry Morgan Prince into its vaudeville act. As Lawrence Gushee
notes,
Much of what [black entertainers] were allowed or expected to do drew on
venerable minstrel routines…So the Creole Band’s reliance on the Uncle
Joe routine and the singing of ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ was almost to be
64
expected, as also their wearing of southern farmhand costumes and their
blackface makeup.212
At the same time—also in 1914—jazz pianist and composer Ferdinand “Jelly
Roll” Morton was working in vaudeville, pairing his music with piano stunts and
blackface clowning. The Indianapolis Freeman wrote that Morton
…plays a good piano, classics and rags with equal ease. His one hand
stunt, left hand alone, playing a classic selection, is a good one. [Morton
and his partner, Rose Morton] do an amusing comedy bit, singing ‘That
Ain’t Got ‘Em.’ This is sung by both of them in a duo style. They make a
hit in this, which is Morton’s own composition. In fact he composes most
of his own songs and arranges his other work. As a comedian, Morton is
grotesque in his makeup.213
By the early 1920s, even those jazz bands working outside of vaudeville
theaters, in dance halls and cabarets, were incorporating elements of
vaudevillian theatricality and humor into their performances. Louis Armstrong
remembered a Joe “King” Oliver performance in which
…they went into a number called ‘Eccentric’—that is the one where Papa
Joe took a lot of breaks. He would take a four bar break, then the Band
would play, then he would take four more. At the very last chorus he and
Bill Johnson would do a sort of Act musically. While Joe Oliver would be
talking like a baby [with his cornet], Bill Johnson would pet the baby in his
high voice [with his bass]. The first baby Joe would imitate was supposed
to be a white baby. When Joe’s horn had cried like the white baby, Bill
Johnson would come back with, ‘Don’t Cry Little Baby.’ The last baby was
supposed to be a little colored baby, then they would break it up. Joe
would yell, ‘Baaaah! baaaaaaah!” Then Bill would shout, ‘Shut up you lil
so and sooooooo.’ Then the whole house would thunder with laughs and
applauses.214
212
Lawrence Gushee, Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), 13.
213
“MORTON & MORTON: Comedy, Music, Dancing,” Indianapolis Freeman, June 13, 1914.
214
Louis Armstrong, “The Armstrong Story,” in Louis Armstrong in His Own Words: Selected Writings,
edited by Thomas Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Originally written in 1954.
65
In fact, Armstrong’s anecdote describes a combination of vaudeville-style humor,
represented by the comic dialogue between Oliver and Johnson, and “novelty”
effects, which will be discussed in detail below.
Humorous spoken dialogue and short vaudeville-style skits appear
frequently in the recorded work of Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton,
arguably the two most important jazz recording artists of the 1920s. Morton, who
spent his early career touring with small vaudeville stock companies,215 as in the
aforementioned Indianapolis Freeman review, makes heavy use of comedic
dialogue and extramusical sound effects on his classic 1926-1927 small group
recordings with his band, the Red Hot Peppers. Clearly displaying the influence
of vaudeville theater on his work, Morton makes masterful use of sonic detail to
create scenes. In his 1926 “Steamboat Stomp,” for example, Morton opens with
a snippet of comic dialogue but also includes such details as the whistle of the
titular steamboat, which opens the recording, crowd noise, and even the faint
sound of a banjo strumming on the shore.216 Another recording from 1926, “Dead
Man Blues,” provides a miniature reproduction of a traditional New Orleans
funeral, including the tolling of church bells and a band playing “Flee as a Bird to
the Mountain.” True to his roots in vaudeville and minstrelsy, Morton includes the
following exchange between himself and banjoist Johnny St. Cyr, which the two
men deliver in stereotypical black dialect:
215
Howard Reich and William Gaines, Jelly’s Blues: The Life, Music, and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton
(Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2003), 29.
216
Boyd Senter, Steamboat Stomp, Jelly-Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, Victor 20296-B, September 21,
1926.
66
Morton: What’s that I hear twelve o’ clock in the daytime? Church bells
ringin’.
St. Cyr: Man, you don’t hear no church bells ringin’ twelve o’ clock in the
day.
Morton: Yes indeed, somebody must be dead!
St. Cyr: Ain’t nobody dead. Somebody must be dead drunk.
Morton: No, I think it’s a fun’ral. Now lookahere, I believe they is a
funeral. I believe I hear that trambone-phone.217
Morton’s 1926 “Sidewalk Blues” again features comic dialogue and makes heavy
use of extramusical effects like car horns, whistling, and shouting to conjure the
image of a busy street.218 Two Red Hot Peppers recordings from 1927, “Billy
Goat Stomp” and “Hyena Stomp,” feature the goat impression219 and the
incessant laughing,220 respectively, of vaudeville comedian Lew Lamar.
Armstrong’s roughly contemporaneous Hot Five and Seven recordings,
cut between 1925 and 1929, display a similar use of skits and comic dialogue,
but their staging is less vivid than that of the Morton recordings and they make
greater use of ethnic parody, another vaudeville staple. For instance, “The King
of the Zulus” includes an altercation between Armstrong and a man with a heavy
Jamaican accent (performed by Clarence Babcock), who “interrupts” the
recording session to demand a plate of chitlins. The band continues playing only
after pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong offers the interloper a meal.221 Another Hot
Fives recording, “He Likes it Slow,” features humorous singing from the husband
217
Jelly Roll Morton, Dead Man Blues, Jelly-Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, Victor 20252-B, September
21, 1926.
218
Jelly Roll Morton, Sidewalk Blues, Jelly-Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, Victor 20252-A, September
21, 1926.
219
Jelly Roll Morton, Billy Goat Stomp, Jelly-Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, Victor 20772-B, June 4,
1927.
220
Jelly Roll Morton, Hyena Stomp, Jelly-Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, Victor 20772-A, June 4, 1927.
221
Lil Hardin, King of the Zulus, Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, OKeh 8396, June 23, 1926.
67
and wife team of Butterbeans and Susie, who were then famous on the black
vaudeville circuits.222 Armstrong’s later 1920s recordings occasionally featured
brief skits, usually performed by himself and pianist Earl Hines. “A Monday
Date,” for example, begins with about thirty seconds of patter between Armstrong
and Hines:
[Hines piano solo]
Armstrong: Hey, say, say, say Earl Hines, why don’t you let us in on
some of that good music, Pops?
Hines: Well c’mon in, let’s get together, then.
Armstrong: All right, tune up, boys.
[Band tuning]
Armstrong: How’s that? All right? Is that all right?
Hines: [ambivalently] Aw, that sounds pretty good…
Armstrong: [mockingly] Yes, that sounds pretty good. I bet if you had a
half a pint of Miss Circe’s gin you wouldn’t say ‘that sounds pretty good.’
Well anyhow, we gonna play anyway. Hey c’mon Zutty [Singleton, the
band’s drummer] whip them cymbals, Pops.223
On “Tight Like This,” another recording by the same group, the dialogue between
Hines and Armstrong is sexually suggestive, with Hines playing the female role
and speaking in falsetto:
[Ensemble plays a few bars as an opening, followed by piano vamping]
Hines: Oh, it’s tight like this!
Armstrong: No, it ain’t tight like that, either.
Hines: I say it IS tight like this!
Armstrong: Let it be tight like that, then!224
Humor and humorous dialogue continued to serve as a useful device for
jazz musicians long after the 1920s and the decline of vaudeville. An especially
222
Overstreet, He Likes it Slow, Butterbeans and Susie, OKeh 8355, June 18, 1926.
Earl Hines, A Monday Date, Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, OKeh 8609, June 27, 1928.
224
Curl, Tight Like This, Louis Armstrong and His Savoy Ballroom Five, OKeh 8649, December 12, 1928.
223
68
prominent example of the lingering influence of vaudeville on jazz performance
was bebop trumpeter John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, who presented his challenging
modern jazz with liberal amounts of humor. Jazz musician and researcher Bill
Crow recounts a skit that Gillespie and saxophonist James Moody often
performed during concerts:
After the opening chorus of a tune with both horns playing in unison,
Moody and Dizzy would step to the microphone at the same time. They
would bump into each other, stop, look at each other, and pantomime a
dispute, while the rhythm section continued to play…At this point Moody
reaches quickly into his pocket and keeps his hand there, with an obvious
sharp point showing through the material of his pants. Dizzy’s eyes pop
open in alarm, and he reaches into his own pocket. They crouch warily
and circle each other as the tension mounts. Then, simultaneously, they
whip their hands from their pockets and spring dangerously at each
other—and dance an elegant fox-trot together as the rhythm section plays
on.225
In another of Gillespie’s well-known onstage antics, he would announce, “And
now, I’d like to introduce the members of the band,” before proceeding to literally
introduce the members of the band to each other.226
Interestingly, humor served the same purpose for the jazz modernists of
the bebop era that it had for the early jazz musicians in vaudeville. Jokes and
skits were useful in coaxing audiences to accept bebop, a new and intellectually
challenging form of jazz improvisation. Similarly, bands like the Creole Jazz
Band and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band had employed vaudeville humor to
engage their audiences, and in this way were able to get their new and radical
improvised music before attentive crowds. A late example of the humorous
225
226
Bill Crow, Jazz Anecdotes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 310.
Ibid., 311.
69
sketch appears on trumpeter and bandleader Thad Jones’s 1979 album Eclipse,
which features Jones fronting his big band of the same name. The album’s
arrangement of “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” features trombonist Richard
Boone singing a comically stiff version of the lyrics before Jones stops him in
disgust. Jones then leads the entire band in singing “hip” lyrics to the standard,
which jokingly invoke the stereotype of the destitute jazz musician (“I can’t give
you anything but love/ ‘Cause I’m beat to my socks, everything is in hock”).
Following this, Boone, having finally gotten the right idea, responds with a chorus
of scat singing.227
Vaudeville also exerted a crucial influence on jazz performance in the area
of tone production. The tradition of altering instrumental timbres in jazz
performance has its roots in West African music, which enslaved Africans
brought to the Americas beginning in the 17th century. One of the key stylistic
features of West African music is the use of instruments to emulate the human
voice, particularly in the case of the kalangu, or talking drum.228 This instrumental
practice is one of the foundational aesthetic principles of African-American music,
serving as the basis for the flexible intonation and timbral variation evident in
such genres as the blues and gospel music. The manipulation of instrumental
timbre among vaudeville musicians was unusual in that it had its roots in
southern African-American folk culture, which then entered vaudeville through
the work of early jazz musicians. Vaudeville companies then popularized the use
of these devices—called “novelty” or “freak” effects—bringing them to white and
227
Harvey Siders, “Thad Jones: Eclipse,” JazzTimes, January/February 2005,
http://jazztimes.com/articles/15491-eclipse-thad-jones (accessed October 23, 2012)
228
Gioia, The History of Jazz, 9.
70
Northern black audiences and musicians, most of whom were unfamiliar with the
conventions of southern black folk music. These musicians then reapplied the
tools of tonal manipulation to jazz improvisation in non-theatrical contexts. Early
jazz musicians in vaudeville used their instruments to simulate a variety of
nonmusical sounds, including growls, grunts, squeals, sobbing, and laughter.
For example, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band incorporated simulated animal
sounds into their performances, most famously on their influential recording of
“Livery Stable Blues.” Like the vaudeville musicians who would follow their
example, the musicians of the ODJB used novelty sounds purely for comedic
effect. Geoffrey Ward notes that
The emphasis [in the ODJB’s recordings] was on comedy: Nick LaRocca
made his cornet whinny like a horse; Larry Shields crowed like a rooster
with his clarinet; Daddy [Eddie] Edwards made his trombone moo.229
This manipulation of tone color to emulate the human voice or nonmusical sound
informed the work of Louis Armstrong, whose trumpet sound mirrored the
gravelly tone of his voice. It resurfaced in the free jazz of the 1960s and 70s,
although its use changed significantly with the new musical context. The main
difference between the effects in the vaudeville work of groups like the ODJB and
the free jazz of Ornette Coleman or the Art Ensemble of Chicago was that the
later jazz musicians expanded the emotional palette of “novelty” effects in an
effort to express a complex range of emotions like anger, sadness, and longing in
addition to comedy.
229
Ward and Burns, Jazz, 64.
71
Similarly, jazz brass players’ use of a variety of unorthodox mutes stems
from the African-American folk tradition of tonal manipulation. Cornet, trumpet,
and trombone players in vaudeville frequently made use of mutes to create new
sounds, particularly while accompanying blues singers. Garvin Bushell recalled
that the first trumpet player to use a plunger mute was Johnny Dunn, who was
then performing in vaudeville with blues singer Mamie Smith.230 However, in an
interesting exception to the trend mentioned above, it would appear that the use
of mutes—unlike the more general sound effects mentioned above—owes most
of its continuing importance among brass players to other forms of entertainment.
By far the most influential musician to frequently employ mutes, Joe “King”
Oliver, rose to fame performing for dancers in Chicago nightclubs and later
through recordings by his Creole Jazz Band, although he did perform briefly in
vaudeville with pianist, composer, and publisher Clarence Williams. The
Indianapolis Freeman mentioned that Oliver was part of a band studded with
other early jazz pioneers, and that they performed Williams’s newest
compositions:
Mr. [Clarence] Williams and his partner, Prof. Armand J. Piron, are going
on a big tour for a month, demonstrating their new songs…on their tour
they are taking with them a seven-piece ragtime Creole band: Prof.
Armand J. Piron, violinist; Mr. Henry Zeno, trap drummer; Mr. Zu
Robinson, trombonist; Mr. Bachai [sic, possibly Sidney Bechet], clarinetist;
Mr. Joe Olliver [sic], cornetist; Kid Eddie, bass violinist; Mr. Clarence
Williams, pianist.231
230
Crow, Jazz Anecdotes, 31.
Clarence Williams, “Manhattan Cabaret Closed for a Month,” Indianapolis Freeman, August 19, 1916,
231
6.
72
It was, however, through the mediums of recordings and nightclub performances
for dancers that Oliver’s vocalized style would influence the Ellington trumpet
section, the work of modern jazz musicians like Miles Davis, and contemporary
players like Wynton Marsalis.
Perhaps the single most important and pervasive influence that vaudeville
entertainment has had on jazz is in the area of repertoire. A large percentage of
the songs that competent jazz musicians are expected to know and perform
originally appeared on vaudeville stages, where they became popular and were
then adopted by jazz musicians as fodder for improvisation. Until roughly 1930,
Tin Pan Alley music publishers’ primary means of publicizing new songs was to
persuade famous vaudevillians to work them into their acts. After hearing the
music, audiences would rush out to buy the sheet music—or so the publishers
hoped. At the beginning of a new season, vaudeville performers would visit
publishing houses to find new songs to add to their acts. For a steep fee,
publishing houses could also create completely new material, although the high
prices—$25.00 per week against future royalties—meant that only star
performers could afford to take advantage of this service.232 Other employees of
the major publishing houses visited theaters, attempting to convince vaudeville
stars to perform the newest pop songs. These men, known as “pluggers,” would
often sing along from the audience when a new song appeared for the first
232
David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: The Composers, the Songs, the Performers and their Times (New York:
Donald I. Fine, Inc, 1988), xx.
73
time.233 This was another attempt at making new songs “stick” with prospective
audiences, increasing sheet music sales.
Early jazz musicians, many of whom were actually working in show
business and all of whom paid careful attention to popular taste, quickly adopted
the new popular songs coming out of Tin Pan Alley by way of vaudeville. As
David Jasen points out, contemporary audiences did not perceive early jazz as a
distinct musical genre, but more as a “new style of playing popular songs.”234
Accordingly, the repertoires of the early jazz bands heavily featured Tin Pan Alley
pop songs which audiences would have recognized from vaudeville shows, such
as “Indiana,” “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” and “Ja-Da.” Many of these Tin Pan
Alley compositions became so ingrained within the jazz community that jazz
musicians still perform them today. These songs, known as “standards,” make
up the core of the jazz musician’s repertoire. The long list of jazz standards that
premiered in vaudeville includes “Remember,” “After You’ve Gone,”235 “Get
Happy,”236 “Everybody Loves My Baby,”237 “I Found a New Baby,”238 “Honeysuckle
Rose,”239 “Ain’t Misbehavin’”240 “Body and Soul,”241 and “Stormy Weather.”242
233
Ibid., xvii.
Ibid., 74.
235
Ibid., 67-111.
236
David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Songwriters, 1880-1930 (New York:
Schirmer Books, 1998), 94.
237
Ibid., 173.
238
Ibid., 178.
239
Ibid., 205.
240
Ibid., 210.
241
Will Friedwald, Stardust Melodies: The Biography of Twelve of America’s Most Popular Songs (New
York: Pantheon Books, 2002), 154.
242
Ibid., 280.
234
74
Conclusion
In the early 1950s, former vaudevillian Joe Laurie wrote that “…the real,
honest, vital vaudeville of the old two-a-day of the Palace (and other big-time
vaude) will never return.”243 Laurie was right. By the 1940s, a combination of
economic pressures, —the Great Depression dealt the major vaudeville circuits a
devastating blow—new technology, and changing tastes in entertainment had
ended America’s vaudeville era. The powerful influence that vaudeville exerted
on American popular culture during its heyday, however, had permanently
altered the landscape of American arts and entertainment. Vaudevillian’s early
and enthusiastic adoption of jazz is a case in point, as it proved one of the most
consequential—if under-recognized—trends in jazz history.
Just before the turn of the 20th century, jazz existed mainly within southern
black communities. It almost certainly would not have enjoyed its meteoric rise
from an insular, regional folk music to an international entertainment
phenomenon without vaudeville’s aid in reaching the American masses. In the
space of about twenty years, early jazz had spread from its origins in the
American South to the rest of the United States and as far away as Europe.
Such a young and disreputable music with obscure folk origins likely never would
have achieved mass popularity had it not caught the ears of enterprising
promoters and inventive entertainers, who granted jazz musicians access to what
243
Joe Laurie Jr., Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1953), 4.
75
was at the time the most efficient avenue for rapid cultural dissemination. The
vast network of vaudeville circuits, from the big-time Keith and Orpheum chains
to the smallest traveling tent shows, touched nearly every community in early 20th
century America. Because jazz quickly permeated several different aspects of
vaudeville entertainment, ranging from pit orchestras to comedy acts, audiences
around the country learned about the new music in an unprecedentedly short
time.
In conducting research and writing this paper, I hoped to shed new light on
the discussion surrounding the development and popularization of early jazz and
to challenge the relatively simplistic popular view regarding jazz’s exclusive
development in New Orleans, thus building on the more recent work of scholars
such as Mark Berresford, Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff, and Lawrence Gushee. The
information that I have found, in the form of contemporary news reports, reviews,
oral accounts, and, in some cases, recordings, does just that. Describing the
important role that vaudeville musicians—and American vaudeville generally—
played in jazz history doesn’t displace New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz so
much as it locates musicians’ activities in that city in the broader context of
musical developments that were happening simultaneously in other communities
around the United States. For instance, while Charles “Buddy” Bolden, often
called the “first jazz musician,” was performing his new music for parades and
parties in New Orleans, clarinetist Wilbur Sweatman was playing an early form of
jazz in midwestern vaudeville theaters and museums. Or, in another example,
small-time black tented vaudeville shows were featuring the music of jazz bands
76
and improvising jazz soloists for at least some years before the Original Dixieland
Jazz Band arrived in New York City to make their first recordings.
All of these considerations add a few layers of complexity to the sketchy
ideas still circulating in the popular imagination regarding the first decade or so of
jazz history, many of which are based on oral histories collected long after the
fact or on vague inferences from recordings. Additionally, a careful examination
of the music of jazz ensembles in vaudeville will bring much-needed attention to
the innovative work of musicians who often fail to appear in mainstream jazz
histories. It is the musicologist’s job to challenge widely held assumptions in
order to deepen our collective knowledge of music and music history. This
project hopefully will have gone some way toward achieving this goal for the
scholarly discourse surrounding early jazz.
77
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